Sony has been in the news recently for a security breech which exposed customers' personal information (including financial accounts) to unauthorized access.
I am also ready a book called Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters (I won't give full details as I don't think it os worth many educators' attentions). In that book, the authors goes into detail of the search habits of Americans and what we can learn from it. (For example why "prom dress" is such a popular search in January and where in the country "plus size prom dress" is most popular.) The author reassures readers in the introduction (I did not find his words reassuring), that the data he used for his book (and that he uses in his work as a search analyst) has been "scrubbed" of personal data including locations, financial account information, social security numbers, and similar data.
Now, I am not sure if the editor added that caveat in order to avoid problems with readers, or if the authors added that in because his organization actually does anonymize the data they use, or if the author wrote that with his "fingers crossed" and was actually misleading his readers. We are all left to wonder if the data are being collected without our knowledge. I am increasingly worried about this...
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