Marketing Issues Associated with Online Data Collection by Advertisers;

There is an increased interest and use of information which can be collected from a person's digital footprint. Individually, the single pieces of information may not provide any great insight to a behavior patterns, but with firms able to collect and aggregate data, they are able to create profiles which will be used for commercial purposes. This may be seen as good sense, when considered from a commercial perspective, as much of the information collected is not personal, as the information may be seen as non-intrusive, such as occupation, home value, There is also data collected that is more personal, such as the type and amount of spending on different products, from luxury goods through to cat food (Singer np). The digital footprint information, when aggregated, can provide a great deal of insight into the profile...

Data which may predict financial status, viability and potential spending is collected and stored in a manner that works around the Fair Credit Reporting Act (Singer np), so not only is there a large amount of data collected, there are not the same rights to inspect or correct erroneous data. If it is not protected it may be argued it is not private. However, looking at a concrete example; if one looks at the collection of data of a similar nature in the physical world it could only be gathered by physically following someone around (or using surveillance equipment),…