The greatest value of the 21st century

Hello.
Today I want to write about the most expensive currency of the 21st century, which became the subject of real hunting and fighting for big and not so big companies.
This is not gold and not precious stones, not oil or gas, this currency as well as bitcoins can not be touched, but nevertheless it is of great value.

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This value is our personal data.
The biggest scandal is now connected with facebook and using personal data of users for political advertising.
Also, in appearance, an innocuous application for a smartphone that allows you to find out under what name you are recorded in contacts, other people have collected 3.5 billion contacts of people from all over the world, and the user agreement originally indicated that the company can transfer data to third parties and use them for the purpose marketing.
When it comes to surveillance and the use of personal data of people, everyone first of all talk about special services that thus hunt down criminals and terrorists.

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But these services need data from only a few thousand people from the entire population of the planet to the rest of them there is no special case, in countries with dictatorial regimes, special services are primarily interested in the opposition, but the opposition is also not very large.
Ordinary people who lead the simplest way of life, not connected with politics and criminals, state bodies are not interesting, but they are interesting to a large number of companies that want to earn on them.
In what ways do they do this?
I will list and briefly describe some of the ways.

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All your actions on the Internet are not ignored, any clicks, referrals, search requests are all recorded in detail and analyzed using cookies, some sites even warn about it. but such a minority. Almost all sites on the Internet put dozens of programs on their website that collect any information about the user who looked at them.
Statistics services and web analytics, advertising services that want to know what products or services you are looking for to offer them to you.
Information about you goes not only through the browser when browsing the Internet, but also through the various devices that you use, phones, tablets, fitness trackers.

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Companies specializing in this accumulate colossal information about sex, age, family status, professional interests, consumer habits and people's desires, although they claim that they use only impersonal personal data.
Internet traces serve as a basis for constructing audit segments - multi-level portraits of population groups used for advertising, scoring, or employee search.
The more data there is about a person who is stored in different cookies, the more accurate a person's portrait can make up a company. Portrait in the sense of consumer habits, lifestyle, an approximate place of residence.
The leaders in the amount of information collected about people are such Internet giants as Google, Facebook and others. They have the most complete information, which includes telephone numbers and other data. Of course, they share this data with no one they want to use for their own purposes, and small companies related to the business of gathering information about people use their methods of searching and extracting information. Such companies look for mobile phone numbers left on various sites and make advertising calls and, if the person agrees with the advertisement, they redirect him to the company with the seller, receiving a reward for it.

In the following posts, I will describe more ways used by the business to obtain information about a person and his preferences.
What was shown before only in the fantastic films in the form of the Big Brother following every step of a person has already become a reality, only the government, and private business, is watching not only to increase the sale of their goods.
Thank you.