DEV Community

Cover image for Data is Everything!
Aniket Singh
Aniket Singh

Posted on • Edited on

Data is Everything!

We live in a world where "data" is given more priority than others πŸ™„, and that's a fact 😎! No one wanted to share about "what they are doing", "where they were last night," etc. just because of privacy reasons 😀. Isn't data privacy something that everyone should understand? πŸ€” And what will happen if we lose it? "If we are connected to the internet, then we start to lose our privacy," said one of the senior developers.

The major source of income for big tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, etc. comes from our data alone. Curious to know how? continue reading below πŸ™‚. Well, we have been discussing so far "data" and "data privacy", Let's decode both.

What is data?

Data is a collection of raw, unorganized facts and details like text, observations, figures, symbols, images and descriptions of things, etc.

What is data privacy?

Data privacy generally means the ability of a person to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent personal information about them is shared with or communicated to others.

Do you have any idea how data was handled in the web1 world, where all of these things were not happening? Check it out.

What is web1?

  1. Web1 was introduced when the internet was born. At that time the main purpose of websites was to show static content in the form of blogs, newsletters, and articles.
  2. All the websites were internally linked using hyperlinks.

Since there were no user interactions with the websites, the businesses used fewer data overall. "No user interactions" in this context refers to the inability of users to add data to websites, give reviews on items, or express their liking. In a nutshell, we may state that "data privacy was the center of the Web 1 universe. πŸ˜‰"

The big picture of Data Privacy comes in the web2 world.

What is web2?

  1. Web2 was introduced in order to bring interactiveness to websites and also users can perform certain actions.
  2. Big tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are currently ruling the web2 world.

Social networking platforms like Instagram and Twitter and e-commerce websites like Amazon and Flipkart spring to mind when we talk about web2. Every day, these business servers receive millions of Terabytes of data uploads.

What actual data gets uploaded to their servers πŸ€” ?

  1. The servers of Twitter and Instagram save your photographs, comments, likes, dislikes, messages, and a variety of other things.
  2. The servers of Flipkart and amazon save your reviews, ratings, purchases, and many other things.

More than 300 million photos get uploaded per day. Every minute there are 510,000 comments posted and 293,000 statuses updated.

Well did I told you that they track your web activity too 🀨? How?

Assuming you've made the decision to get some sneakers from Amazon, you head there to look for them. bought it. Google now suggests some sneakers from a different brand when you start searching for anything else. This is nothing more than a few machine learning algorithms that use information from your online browsing.

Is data that important to a company?

Indeed, from a business standpoint, they were interested in learning things like "Are people content with our product? ", "Which product is trending on our platform? ", "reviews linked to a product? ", etc.

There are several businesses that utilize user data for marketing, financial, and healthcare analysis.

Future of Data - Alternative data 😎!

What is Alternative Data?

Alternative data is defined as non-traditional data that can provide an indication of future performance of a company outside of traditional sources, such as company filings, broker forecasts, and management guidance.

Want to know more about alternative data πŸ˜„?
Check out Proxycurl now!

Top comments (0)