Preface:
In a world that is rapidly evolving to include various trackers of our actions and transactions, most notably our cellular devices, concerns are on the rise of whether or not businesses should be able to track such information about their customers. Whether it be concerns of personal privacy or free will, people in the United States are increasingly demanding more legislative protections for greater transparency and accountability from such businesses.
For: The Potential Benefits of Tracking Personal Information and Consumer Data
When considering the often mercurial attitude of market demand and consumer preferences, it can be especially difficult for businesses to fully and accurately meet consumer expectations, thereby potentially leading to waste being developed or a loss in potential revenue. If businesses were allowed to track information and data about their customers’ preferences and behaviors, businesses, therefore, would be able to more effectively meet consumer demand, in turn leading to increased resource efficiency, customer satisfaction, and potentially a healthier economy as a whole.
Imagine, if you will, that you are a manufacturer or retailer of some sort. Let’s say you run a local grocery store and you need to determine how much produce you need to buy for your inventory. But how do you know exactly what to buy and how much to buy? Well, you base your inventory off of the preferences of your potential customers, because let’s say you bought large quantities of expensive, fancy, sourdough bread, but your customers aren’t huge fans of sourdough bread, nor can they afford such a brand either. Now you have a large quantity of a product that no one will really buy, meaning that you have produced waste since such bread could have potentially been purchased and sold by a different retailer with customers willing to pay for such bread, but instead you have the bread perishing in storage. Additionally, you have wasted money that could have been spent on a different product that could have sold better, and you potentially lost customers since you had to limit your supply of other breads to purchase the sourdough bread. Therefore, if you were able to more accurately track the preferences and purchasing behaviors of your customers, then you, as a retailer, could have managed your inventory and reduced waste within the overall economy more effectively.
When businesses throughout an economy have a more accurate idea of current consumer behaviors, such information can be vital for governments and central banks to regulate economic growth. Inflation, recessions, and other negative economic outcomes become easier to predict, thereby allowing federal institutions to set fiscal and monetary policies at more optimized levels. In turn, a better overall microeconomic image of a person can mean a better understanding of the economy as a whole.
Within the context of providing customers what they desire, collecting consumer data and other information about consumers can help businesses predict what their customers desire on a more individualized basis. With a more accurate image of who their customers are, businesses are better able to satisfy their customers by directing them to products that fit in with their assorted profile of preferences. Customers are then directed to products or services that they are more likely to purchase, whether directly or indirectly, thereby increasing the rate of sales businesses experience. Furthermore, such information on a more individual level cannot only help customers find what they desire, but also determine their idealized prices for such things, thereby not only meeting consumable desires, but also financial means as well. Therefore, if businesses are able to better understand your preferences and behaviors, then they can more adequately meet your desires. Don’t we, as customers, deserve to be happy with what we purchase?
Against: The Immense Costs of Allowing Corporations to Collect Our Data
If you wouldn’t walk around everywhere you go with every bit of your personal information being broadcast on your forehead, you shouldn’t want all of it to be collected by shady data brokers. According to prominent tech journalist Taylor Lorenz, the average American is being unknowingly surveilled by over 75 digital tracking tools everyday, and Google alone collects over 72 million data points on a single user annually. Because the United States has virtually no data privacy laws, there are only specific state laws and laws for certain sectors, any information that data brokers and big corporations collect can be sold to whoever wants to buy it. Incredibly sensitive information like Social Security numbers, bank details, locations, addresses, and health information can be leaked by hackers, used by the government to spy on and go after certain people, or used to harm people in so many other ways.
Corporations, in particular, extensively collect data from consumers. Some examples of companies that do this are Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon. They use this data to sell to data brokers and to create targeted ads in order to get people to buy more of their products. At first, this may seem harmless. After all, what’s so bad about getting personalized ads? The issue is that these ads can be extremely exploitative. For example, if someone has a certain medical condition and is looking for medications, procedures, cures, or other ways of dealing with their issue, a company might send them more ads for similar things. The person struggling with their health might be desperate to improve their lives and could end up wasting a lot of money on random things that are supposed to help but might not actually do that, leaving the person unhealthy and out of money. Insurance companies also buy people’s data, and they can figure out if people or their relatives have various health issues. They can then drop people or refuse to cover them if they decide that someone has a health background that is “too high risk.” Corporations might also just want to drain people’s wallets through regular everyday products. They can get people to buy things that they might not really need, but ads for it keep showing up after they went to a certain website or searched for a specific thing.
Another problem is that these ads aren’t merely just ads. All of the data that can be gained from them are sold to whoever is willing to pay. This means that a lot of information ends up going to the federal government, which means that certain intelligence or law enforcement agencies can easily get all the information they want. For example, according to 404 Media, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) recently bought technology from a company called Penlink to collect location data from anyone who opens an app or visits a website with ads. This works because when companies create ads, they usually target a specific demographic of people in a certain area. Law enforcement can see the location data of people seeing these ads, and can use it to track people to their homes or workplaces. Some companies, like Penlink, explicitly advertise that the location data they collect can be used by the government to track people at protests, which can lead to the chilling of people’s free speech. This kind of location information used to require a court order to be collected due to the Fourth Amendment, but now can just be handed out to anyone with the money to buy it (404 Media). So much data is collected that the government is putting together a central database for any federal or local government agency to use. They’re also using AI to go through data, which can lead to errors or possibly even complete fabrications. There is no oversight to make sure ICE or other law enforcement agencies don’t go after someone based on misinformation from AI, or even just oversight regarding data collection.
This central database is also an issue because if everyone’s information is all in one place, it becomes a big target for hackers. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), in 2025 alone the number of data breaches in the US was 3,322, affecting 279 million victims. Incidents like this actually make businesses raise their prices for goods in order to pay for recovery from the hack, which means that consumers will have to pay more in addition to getting their data leaked. Also according to the ITRC, 38% of small businesses in the US were forced to raise prices last year after data breaches. There will only be more breaches and more people harmed if our data continues to be collected by corporations.
It also costs a lot of money and resources to store such a large quantity of data. Just like for AI databases, an enormous amount of electricity is needed to compute and manage all of the data being stored. The same goes for water, where up to 5 million gallons per day are used to cool those computing machines. It would cost $10 to $25 million a year for one large data center to store this information, according to Stream Data Centers. Businesses might raise prices even more for this, or the money could come from taxpayer dollars if the government is the one holding our data. Ordinary people would be losing what little money they have while corporations destroy the planet in order to store massive amounts of data, which they are only doing to make billionaires and CEOs even more money.
It may seem harmless at first for businesses to collect data for targeted ads, but it has far reaching consequences. Whether it’s allowing companies to put out exploitative ads leading to people losing their health insurance, or paving the way for a surveillance state, or accelerating the climate crisis, corporate data collection has way too many negative effects. Any slight convenience gained by seeing the perfect ad for new shoes, or other items you might want, is vastly outweighed by all of the dangerous repercussions that can come about due to corporate data collection. In the end, it’s never worth the cost to your, or anyone else’s, safety and security.
