Data Mining, the New Dot Com Bubble

During the “Clinton Years”, people still pine those times when life was good, jobs were plentiful and the internet was the next great thing.  Dot com companies were sprouting up all over and millions of dollars were being made from them being bought and sold.  Silicon Valley became the new New York and the mecca for young, talented eggheads who spent far too much time sitting in front of a computer than they did in front of real people.  The internet was the place to be if you wanted to make your fortune and you could find anything and everything that you’re little heart desired.

Well now, only few things have changed.  You can still find almost anything on the internet and more people are now parked in front of their computers instead of parked at the dinner table.  Technology has replaced face to face contact and relationships for human beings can now be judged by the number of hits on any particular dating site.  Silicon Valley is seldom used in an everyday conversation now but they still hold a warm spot in our hearts.  Only after all these spectacular dot com bubbles burst did anyone finally remember that people were not just pixels on a screen.

During those times, there were still a very high number of Americans suffering and struggling to make ends meet but they were not the focus as much as they are now.  There were still single moms and single fathers, seniors fighting to afford their medicine and homeless veterans but they were not a major topic of cyber-space water cooler talk.

Now comes another major movement in the dot com era and it is called data mining.  This is where dot com companies pop up over the internet, claim to provide you a well-needed and deserved service, free of charge and all you have to do is fill out a short personal information sheet.  You do this and they promise to get you connected to the solutions to your problems.  Only it really doesn’t work like that.

You fill out this form, thinking that soon you will hear from a business that will truly help you fix an issue but instead all you get is more and more spam to your email inbox and calls from solicitors trying to sell you something you didn't even ask for.  It appears that those unsolicited callers get somewhat angered by you refusing to take advantage of that spectacular offer they have.  You soon learn that your name and personal information was sold to them on a list that they bought from some data mining company that you may not have ever heard from.

This is the newest way companies use to expand their customer base.  No more need for products that actually work or erases the problem that they were designed to address, they just need people to sell them to and because it is somewhat a web to locate who exactly you should address your concern to, they tend to stay just outside of your reach or change their names to perform this circus act one more time.

Like all bubbles, this too will burst and found among the millions of pieces will be all your information that you once thought was secure.  Strangers will know more about you than family and you will become less than a human being and more a statistic.  The answer, if a website promises something but reading the small print leads you to understand that they are not the actual company that can fix your issue, do not complete their form and instead go directly with that actual company.  Don’t see how many can complain about the government keeping their information when they gladly give it away to business, but then that’s just me and I could be wrong.