You have likely heard about how Google, Facebook, and other providers are “stealing your data” or “monitoring everything you do”. These grand ideas of how these companies and others have really gotten a lot of people thinking about personal data, “my data” and what’s going on with it. Here’s the reality, there’s so much more to the story than this!
As someone who has used online banking for years, this is where I started with personal data. As a teen with limited income, I made a purchase in a retailer with my debit card. I would arrive home and look at my online banking profile and find that the purchase still hadn’t shown up yet and was frustrated because I wanted to keep track of my spending. Sometimes it would take hours or even days. However, I started making use of this data to understand my spending habits and learn lessons like “small purchases add up”, a basic in personal finances. However, if I didn’t have this data I wouldn’t be able to learn this. In what ways can you use financial information (think your online banking options, mint.com, or other personal financial trackers) to make smarter financial decisions?
As I got older I started to care more about health and wellness. I purchased a fitness tracker and started using a couple of apps to track my fitness. The combination of apps and trackers allowed me to use my data to help improve my overall fitness. I learned about the caloric values of various foods, the caloric burn of various activities, and the “real” impact of foods and activities. I made the data work for me to help me achieve the goals I was aiming for. By viewing the “real” data, understanding what it meant, and made the changes to my activities based on the data. In terms of KPIs, I was monitoring Calories, Fat, Sugar, and Salt as input KPIs to try and achieve weight loss as the output KPI. I was using my data to work for me, but just like the banking example, I’m leveraging someone else’s platform to track, monitor, and observe the data which means… I had to give them data to get results.
As mentioned at the top of the post, there are companies out there that will collect, store, and use your data. Perhaps the term “steal” may be a bit of a stretch because, as I said, I “gave” my data to these organizations. I chose to use online banking, agreed to the terms and conditions, and leveraged the insights that they provided me (and still do). In exchange, they are observing patterns and suggesting products and services that I might be interested in and as a conscientious consumer, I say “no”. In the weight loss story, I’m providing my data to them for my use, but once I give it to them, the terms and conditions I agreed to allow them to do other things with it. Why do I take a moment to talk about this? That is because as a data-driven we need to be mindful of our data, what we’re willfully giving up, and to whom.
I advocate for “in-house” solutions as much as possible, this doesn’t mean that organizations like banks or online platforms shouldn’t be used, they are key parts of our data and digital society. As a Business Intelligence Analyst, I use platforms such as Power BI, Google Data Studio, Looker, Tableau, cloud data warehouses (IE Azure, Snowflake, Data Bricks), and other digital solutions. The difference is that I know what they are doing with my data and by paying for these services, I’m paying them not to leak/share my data with anyone else. I also build my own data solutions with MySQL, PHP, Python, and other self-hosted solutions where I can physically point at the computer which hosts this data and these solutions which means I know that nobody else has access.
In what ways can you make your data work for you:
- Do you use online banking? do you review your transactions and purchases?
- how much do you spend on monthly subscriptions?
- How much do you spend on non-essentials?
- How much do you spend at specific retailers or other businesses?
- Do you track your fitness?
- How many steps do you take per day?
- How many calories do you consume in a day?
- How many calories do you burn in a day?
- Do you track personal productivity?
- How many tasks do you have on the go at a given time?
- How much time does a given task take?
- How are there any type of tasks that take longer than others?
- What slows you down most?
- What gives you the most speed/productivity?