Data Aggregation Online
Pros and cons of data aggregation of public information found online. How much of a personal profile can be put together with ALL the data you put in public forums online.
Contents
Description
Data aggregation is any form of gathering information that is displayed in a summarized form. Purposes range from gather demographic information about groups of people to average system start times. Anything that can be statistically analyzed can be aggregated[1]. Traditionally, gathering information about people meant they had to be directly surveyed. There was no way of gathering certain demographic data such as age, income, marital status etc, unless methods were taken to get it through the government. With the rise of the Internet and social media sites, more and more people are willing putting their information in the public domain. Here, data miners and aggregators can gather all of one's information in one fell swoop and data that once took much time and effort to gather can take but a few moments. Moreover, any type of institution can now do this easily - they don't have to hire an outside statistic company to do the work.
What we do and don't know
There are pieces of information gathered that we know about. For instance, we know that any given website has at least our name and email address after we create a login with them. Other websites ask for age, gender, birthday, marital status and other various information. Facebook.com may even have information about who is in your family and who you are dating. We knowingly litter the Internet with little pieces of ourselves - and we are seemingly okay with it (for if we were not okay, we would not use that site). Nowadays, we are able to be tracked by cookies on our computers that track which websites are viewed and what items we look at, in addition to our usernames and names. This data can be aggregated to create a user profile that consists of our interests. This information can then be sold to companies that want to advertise to us or just be kept as statistics, either way many people are not aware that this data is trackable.
Pros of online data aggregation
Each time a user signs up for a website they have to remember another username, password and/or PIN. Companies are now using data aggregation to consolidate all of this data (from banks, airlines, e-mail accounts, and various reward programs) so that users can access all their information in one convenient place. There is also the possibility to have online bill pay and stock tracking in the same place as well [2]. This becomes more and more useful as the average user signs up for more sites and as traditionally non-Internet services (such as banking and financial services) become the norm online. This also makes the host sight an attractive place navigate to while online - this is what attracts businesses to follow this path.
Cons of online data aggregation
As previously mentioned, users of the Internet knowingly and unknowingly leave pieces of themselves across multiple sites, but data aggregators have the ability to combine all of this information if it is public and/or there is a clause in the terms of agreement section that informs the user that their data could be sold or given away to another company
Data aggregating companies
List here
References
[1] http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/definition/data-aggregation [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_aggregator#Role_of_the_Internet
