Who is getting rich off you? The insidious big data economy. | Rita Gunther McGrath

Where is your data now? Follow the money. - Your day to day actions on the Internet give businesses personal data that turns you into an ad target – or the opposite. - Facebook, for example, allowed landlords to block demographic groups such as African Americans, LGBTQ, or disabled people from seeing housing ads – a violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. - Data brokers have crossed a line, but the laws that should regulate them are outdated; just look at the billion-dollar data deal between 23andMe and Big Pharma. Is it ethical? Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, is one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth. She is the author of the best-selling book The End of Competitive Advantage (https://goo.gl/77RdHE) (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) and the upcoming book Seeing Around Corners (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Sept. 2019). Read more at BigThink.com: http://bit.ly/2BhUX7z Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: http://bit.ly/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink A conservative estimate of how much your personal information is worth to these data brokers is on the order of $240 a year for each of us, for millions and millions of people. And that adds up to a really, really big number. And a lot of that data, right, and the advertising against that data is just getting sucked out of conventional sources and going right into the pockets of the big data brokers like Facebook and Google and even Amazon, also a whole bevy of smaller data brokers-- you know, people who run little websites like, you know, Housekeepers Like Me and, you know, do you have insurance, and are you in the market for a new car? And people willingly hand over this information, which then gets aggregated and copied across databases and then put into this package which advertisers can then use to target you. I think we're just at that very early stages where a few people are sounding the alarm. But that has not spread out to the masses yet. I mean, all those people posting about their grandkids on Facebook don't understand...