Your tech is a battleground.  Every service you use on your phone or laptop fights viciously for scraps of your time, attention and personal information – Twitter for your ad-targeting likes, Facebook for information on your political alignment, Google for your clickbait-relevant search history. Amazon wants you to buy from its physical as well as online stores, operating on AI tracking; home devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod hope to assist you and glean your personal and order information along the way. As companies fight for more influence over aspects of our lives – from commutes to shopping to our closest relationships – it is essential to ask how far new technology should go.

Perhaps at the heart of this question is how these companies use information. As consumers in a world where information is becoming increasingly valuable, people must ask themselves how much information they are willing to share and what rights they have to control it. For the most part, online or personal information gathered by companies is either filed away for commercial use or stored in servers.

This allows for more personal content, ads and services. But even information not used for commercial purposes can be accessed by outside parties if the reason is substantial enough; for example, a court case recently used recordings from the defendant’s Amazon Echo as evidence for a murder charge, and it is now commonplace to use search and online purchase history for prosecutor support.  In other words, the possibility that your own devices’ privacy policies could incriminate you is more likely than you think.  

Yet some argue that privacy is a necessary sacrifice for convenience and customization. When the first public Amazon Go – a cashier-free convenience store that closely monitors and charges customers via a complex network of cameras – was unveiled, John Verdi, vice president of Amazon-linked think tank Future of Privacy Forum, said, “Are consumers comfortable with that kind of data collection and use? I suspect many are.” Services like these aren’t taking away privacy for malicious intent; rather, they are gently steering customers into personalized lanes, encouraging them to spend more time and money at favorite sites and locations.

This brand of personalization, however, can also have a dark side. Facebook’s famous fake news fiasco, for example, broke headlines in 2016 when it was revealed that its personalization feature could have influenced the presidential election; non-Facebook social media users tuned in to media that, while perhaps not fraudulent, also contributed to isolated political bubbles and further deepened the divide in an already polarized nation.

Students at PV agree that it’s harder to see the other side of the screen when reading personalized feeds. “Everyone’s tweets reflect their own opinions,” says junior Regan Breen. “It’s like they’re stuck in their own world.” As services like these gain more information, they can recommend almost everything – from restaurants to movies to ways to think.

Although technological change is inevitable, it is important to recognize its associated risks.  Privacy and unbiased information are fast-disappearing commodities in our rapidly developing world.