Would you care if someone knew everything about you, yet had never spoken to you? It has become clear that even though the sheer number of online technologies has skyrocketed, regulations to maintain privacy have not followed suit. Many companies and platforms are now able to make predictions about other supposedly “private” parts of your life by spying on your online activity. For example, Target knew about a woman’s pregnancy before she did and gave her recommendations for baby products. These algorithms have become too powerful and could begin to shape your day to day decisions. As students at an American university, it’s our obligation to seek out a means to regulate these algorithms.
In 2024, the average person generated roughly 15 terabytes of data per day. That’s 15 times the storage of an average iPhone. And for members of Generation Z who spend more than twice the amount of time online than their counterparts in older demographics, this number is likely higher. With classes, homework, movies, social media, and shopping, Gen Z students spend more time online than ever.
Historically, tech companies like Meta would be able to sort different users into categories based on their preferences for certain products, and then make predictions for a given group as a whole. For instance, they could recommend ads to a group denoted as “soccer moms” and advertise orange slices and cleats. However, with the sheer amount of data available today, many companies can form individual profiles for each person on a platform.
This means that most companies that collect data — Meta, Google, Instagram, etc. — can actually influence your spending habits more than one might initially think. And while some might argue that this increase in data actually makes your life more straightforward by allowing companies to recommend exactly the products you want, the sheer amount of data presents a more dystopian possibility in which companies can actually alter which products we desire in the first place.
Not only can companies alter our desires, but it’s in their best interest to do so. Imagine a Penn student, John, whose online browser history is erratic and shifts between disparate topics such as sports, cooking, and films. It’s difficult to tell which of these three subjects will capture his attention in at a given moment and therefore harder to effectively market certain products to him. For instance, an ad about a new movie may fall flat if John is currently invested in the NBA finals. However, if John were to only care about sports, then platforms such as Meta would simply have to market sports content to him. In essence, it is in these data-based companies’ best interests to actually narrow what you’re interested in buying.
What we buy is inextricably linked with who we are. Therefore, as students who, hopefully, wish to retain our own agency, we must limit this data mining.
I don’t blame these companies for their massive amounts of data collection. They are only operating as rationally as almost every company before them when they use this data to maximize profits. Instead, with how much data collection seems to border on individual rights, I believe it is time to pass regulations on data collection itself.
The United States government already has laws such as the E-Government Act of 2002, which limits the ease with which the federal government can collect personal information from residents. Even after the government violated many of these laws, as revealed during Eric Snowden’s release of classified information, the USA Freedom Act was passed, ensuring that the government could only collect phone metadata from phone companies after obtaining a court order.
When someone logs onto a company's platform and interacts with their products, said company is allowed to gather data — especially if this practice is explicitly mentioned in their terms of service. However, where do we draw the line is if from this limited data, a company is able to make laser accurate predictions about other aspects of someone’s life. In essence, they legally have access to other pieces of private information. As young people and students who have spent most of our lives online, we are most at risk to having an algorithm excavate personal information from the vast swaths of data we have dumped online.
No current legislation exists to address this liminal space between prediction and knowledge. Nevertheless, the very fact that certain companies can discern private information is a violation of a person’s personal privacy. It’s up to us to decide if we are ok with that.
ROSHAN GOPAL is a College sophomore studying mathematics from New York. His email is rgopal@sas.upenn.edu.
