We all use one, if not multiple, digital platforms on a daily basis. We rely on them for news, entertainment, organization, relationships, work, and more. The top ten social media platforms alone have 13.56 billion active users, and that figure doesn’t take into account lifestyle, utility, productivity, and informational apps. Most of these apps are free to use… at least monetarily.
 
We live much of our lives on digital platforms and rely on the private companies that provide them, resulting in these companies having an unprecedented amount of data on us. And it would seem that there isn’t much to be done about it; our economy is all but completely reliant on a web-based infrastructure, with every area of the internet owned by an individual or a private company. Though these private sections of the internet don’t require money to access, the accounts we create funnel our data to these private entities. And despite such wide spread support on the internet, 67% of Internet users in the U.S. are not aware of their country’s privacy and data protection rules [read], and almost 80% of Americans on the web worry about companies infringing their online privacy [read].
 
What do these entities do with that information?
 
How much of our privacy do we surrender with that data?
 
Do we really understand the tradeoffs involved when we purchase with our privacy?