The Power of Data Collection

Upon scrolling through your Facebook News Feed on a Tuesday evening with a cup of tea, you may notice more and more often that things you click on are actually articles fed to you by Facebook itself, rather than posts shared by your friends. The level of advertising and external promotion is reaching new heights as data collection methods are refined and software programs can pinpoint things that are actually of specific interest to you.

By injecting these into your News Feed in a similar style to all of the other posts, it’s more than easy to actually find yourself reading through suggested articles and visiting a clothes website you’d never heard of before. This can happen despite people’s most adamant opposition and irritation at online adverts. Why? Because you have offered a data trail allowing things to now be accurately tailored to your interests.

“You’ve provided a data trail allowing things to now be accurately tailored to your interests.”

The uses of data collection can also reach far beyond those of social media advertising. Non-profit organisations such as ODI have been founded to try and utilise open data and promote a data sharing culture in order to utilise modern technology for social benefits. Their initiative has been backed by a £10 million government grant. Their idea boils down to the fact that on a larger scale if digital data, essentially information, is shared and harnessed everyone can be more clued up and subsequently life will be easier and better. If everyone is sharing their work then it saves time and resources.

An example would be that if there were a mobile app that was up-to-date with a given location, crime reports, levels of social movement (i.e. people in a given place at a given time), then were a young girl wanting to find the safest route to the train station late at night, the app would be able to harness open data and thus provide social benefit.

“Save the user time and effort.”

The power and utility of online data collection is ever growing and a fascinating topic to dig into. For a digital agency such as Parallax, the value of data collection seats itself at the core of our work. Our designs are based upon optimised user functionality. Through data collection and tracking we able to monitor the movement of users through a website, allowing us to understand how to offer our customers and their users websites that will provide information quickly and seamlessly. It saves time for the user browsing the website, as well as saving our clients countless time and effort by reaching the right users quickly, offering optimal exposure.

So is digital data collection a good thing or a bad thing? Is it propelling society forward or violating people’s privacy? Although there are always risks within the online world, which it is wise to be aware about, ultimately transparency and collaboration are going to be the things that allow companies to generate maximal results. In this regard, data collection empowers not only us as a digital agency to achieve excellent results, but also society as a whole to be more informed and more precise. That I believe is a good thing.

What are your thoughts on data collection and how it’s used? Drop us a message on Twitter or leave a comment below.