Data Junkies

I remember how, back in the last century, certain practices around handling personal information were normalized — and even back then, as a child or teenager, I found them quite unsettling. One of them was the phone book — the white pages — where you could find the personal details of any subscriber unless they had explicitly requested not to appear (any Gen-Xer who’d seen Terminator could grasp the danger this posed — especially if your name was Sarah Connor).

Another way of exposing personal data that baffled me was how people looked for jobs: handing out résumés in person. Walking around a neighborhood leaving copies of all your contact information with complete strangers — even if they weren’t advertising any open positions.

That naive mindset stuck with us well into the first decades of this century, until the problem of how we handle personal data became so obvious it exploded in our faces.

This week’s news was that McDonald’s appears to have exposed sensitive data from millions of job applicants due to a chatbot. Reading headlines like that — even if they’re often just clickbait — is deeply concerning in 2025. One of my top priorities as an engineer is ensuring the security of user data: how it’s handled, transmitted, and stored. I always try to follow the principle of collecting only the minimum amount of information necessary.

Unfortunately, marketing experts have become data junkies. They want to know every detail about users that could allow for hyper-granular segmentation in the pursuit of ever more effective campaigns. That need is increasingly at odds with a society that is becoming more aware of the importance of protecting privacy.

From experience, my personal opinion is that we’re giving away our data far too cheaply — especially when compared to the risks of it falling into the wrong hands.

exit(0);