The amount of people who want to exploit your private information is staggering, from social media platforms to email providers. It is imperative to remember not only online stores but personal services as well.
Many online businesses rely heavily on your information, and they pay no attention to customer privacy.
You are unknown to most advertisers and marketers. In addition, a Mobile Advertising ID (MAID) identifier is assigned to your behavior, and a history of your activities is gathered.
With this tiny bit of information, your location, your shopping history, or your recent online searches can be accessed.
There were very few factors you could control until recently to block your MAID from marketing campaigns. As a result of Apple's decision, iOS users now can choose who targets them through the app.
Criminals, however, are likely to generate much greater profits if they can match the ID with the individual.
A MAID's ability to defraud you
Most companies or advertising agencies would not be able to find out who the MAID belongs to if he or she was not attached to a company.
In this collection, there are numerous data sets, and there should be no personally identifiable information (PII) included in the collection. Vice's Motherboard wrote about one company that offers the tracking of MAIDs with the PII associated with each of them.
The use of mobile phones in everyday life poses a considerable amount of privacy risk, which is a major concern. Your MAID can be linked to the following information that can be provided by the company:
- Full name
- Physical address
- Phone number
- Email address
- IP address
There should be a red flag raised for everyone after it was revealed that data brokers are capable of integrating advertising IDs with mobile phone numbers.
