Is going incognito really anonymous anymore? Can you search something on the net without letting others know? Can you watch something on your laptop without having someone know what it was? The answer is no.
The word ‘anonymous’ and ‘incognito’ don’t hold the same value anymore. There was a time where you could do anything you wanted on the Internet without someone else knowing. However in recent times this has become impossible with every move of ours being tracked. It is definitely helpful in some ways but as they say, “everything in life comes with it’s own set of pros and cons”, you can’t have one without the other.
When talking about the benefits of tracking data:
- The data collected provides a deeper understanding of your market. You can know your consumer base and work accordingly.
- Data Collection Improves Your Consumer Database. People who have connected with your brand in some manner will be able to provide you with their IP addresses, email addresses, and maybe phone numbers. This way you can contact them later on.
- Consumer Data Improves Your Marketing Strategies. By gathering data, you can optimise your marketing effort if you want to outrank your competitors, boost conversions, and develop a sense of trust and transparency between your business and your target market.
- It Enables Greater Personalisation in the sense that gathering data enables you to satisfy customer expectations in terms of personalised messages and ideas.
As you can see, there are several advantages to collecting customer data; yet, those advantages come with certain disadvantages too.
- The fact is as much as we try to protect our privacy, it is impossible to control if fully. When we log in to most websites, we click on the option “Accept all cookies”. Cookies are small files that websites send to your device that the sites then use to monitor you and remember certain information about you — like what’s in your shopping cart on an e-commerce site, or your login information.
- When it comes to WhatsApp, the notification “End-to-end encryption” ensures only you and the person you’re communicating with can read or listen to what is sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp. However, we have often seen that these messages have been leaked to the world.
- “Terms & Conditions” – When you agree to a platform’s terms of service, you also agree to their privacy policy, which describes how they will use your data. But who has the time to read all those pages of legalese. And that’s how we give access to our privacy easily.
- When using google’s incognito mode, you aren’t actually incognito. You might not be able to view your history, but google and the government have access to it. So much for ‘incognito’ right.
Unfortunately, everything you do on the internet can be tracked. The things you watch, the articles you read, the images you screen shot, etc. The duration of you looking at an image is also tracked and taken into account. There is no such thing as complete privacy anymore. Everything you do is monitored. It’s only through tracking that videos are recommended and articles of a similar category keep coming up. We can’t stop our data from being recorded. All we can do is properly check the websites we give access to.
