In a recent study by Ketch Kloud, a data privacy management company, only 12 percent of major US websites honor privacy settings set by users. These findings were gathered by conducting an automated sweep of 134 major US websites. They used browser emulation to see the extent of tracking, data collection, and user profiling on these websites and focused on two states; when a user opts in vs. opts out of data tracking and collection.
So what did they find? 55 percent of these trackers are geared toward marketing, advertising, and personalization mapping. 40% of the trackers collecting this data ignore consumer preferences for data sharing, so it’s the same whether you opt-in or out of data collection in these cases! 40 percent is a very high discrepancy, which ultimately sets a dire precedent. Apparently, a lot of this is due to the rise of AI and the need to collect vast amounts of data to sell to companies for training. This is a case of quantity over everything else, especially privacy and security. We recently saw a data broker, Gravy Analytics, get hacked, and information like this got stolen. Hopefully, we’ll get more regulation to stop these vast data collections in the future.
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