How companies are using your data

Jill picks up her phone to plan a trip out to meet a client. She checks her route via Google Maps, and realizes the best way to get there is on a cab. She gets an Uber and rushes down while sending a message via Gmail to her client to tell him she’s on the way. Finally, she logs on to DoorDash to order some food for them to enjoy while they discuss. It certainly sounds like an average day of life, but in these short couple of minutes, Jill has already valuable data to over four companies that use it to understand consumers better and make products out of it. And taking a step back; Jill is part of a whole network of millions of consumers who leave data trails for corporations and data harvesters to analyze and learn more about what everyone wants.

Data seems to be all the craze these days. Companies making you do surveys and placing trackers all over websites that note down your every move. “Data products” seem to be the phrase that’s thrown around a lot, but what are they?

Companies collect statistics from their customers to build an understanding of what we like and what we do. But on top of the material we provide via surveys and polls comes big data so large only computers can process to show trends and patterns. This is where the money’s at today as corporations try to harvest as much details they can from the way behave to create new products that we never knew we wanted.

What do companies do with our data?

Google, Amazon and Facebook may be handy internet services for the most of us, but they are first and foremost advertising agencies. With links all over the internet and our mobile devices, trackers – or cookies – take note of the sites we browse and the things we search.

This data is fed to algorithms that pair our activity with advertisements its closely associated with. If you were searching up phones online, the algorithm might put up ads for phone plans or phone cases. Other out looking for cars may find insurance deals.

Targeted advertising has become so much more cost-effective than billboards today, using data we leave online to accurately pinpoint consumers who’d want to see these ads.

Data is also carefully analyzed to make operations within a corporation more efficient. There’s no clearer example than Amazon.

Jeff Bezos’ company have patented an anticipatory shipping model, that uses data collected online to predict the products customers are likely to purchase. A sudden surge of searches for winter clothing in Illinois instructs Amazon to send more winter items to local distribution centers in the area, which will be ready for one-day delivery.

Data products like these help Amazon to reduce delivery time and wastage of goods, raising the likelihood of stock getting sold.

Many of these internet giants provide the infrastructure for the rest of the internet. Amazon offers Amazon Web Services, powering over 40% of internet servers.