Marquette's Annual Symposium on the Ethics of Big Data Tomorrow, Focusing on Information Gathering
Tuesday, April 30th, 2019 -- 1:55 PM
(WRN) -Marquette's annual symposium on the Ethics of Big Data is set for Wednesday, and the keynote speaker says tech companies need to answer for the information they're gathering on us.Marquette will be hosting a symposium on the Ethics of Big Data this week, and the keynote speaker says it's time to consider just what information private businesses have on you. UW Milwaukee professor Michael Zimmer says that even if you don't have a Facebook account, the company probably has a file on you.
"Basically who you are. They map out what they call the Social Graph, and they map out who's a friend of a friend of a friend, and they piece together all these variables."
Zimmer says it's even more important to question data collection as we head into another election season.
"The Cambridge Analytica scandal and what happened with Facebook after the 2016 election really shined a light on how much power just a couple companies have and how much data they have about us as individuals."
Zimmer says consumers are finally waking up to just what sorts of personal information they're turning over to big corporations.
"And even thought I might be posting something on Facebook, or I might be searching for something on Google, I should be able to expect that data stays in that context and doesn't get used for any other kind of purpose."
The Facebook also tracks you via those little Facebook Like buttons you see on webpages, keeping an eye on what sort of things you're interested in, in order to sell ads to other companies. Zimmer says it's important to have these discussions in the wake of Russian social media manipulation and other problems that snarled the internet during the 2016 presidential election. The symposium is a partnership between Marquette, UW-Milwaukee, and Northwest Mutual.
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