Apps, Technology and Your Information

TechnoAdmin
Apps, Technology and Your Information

For the past couple of months you have probably seen the media coverage surrounding Facebook and the data breach allowing for the misuse of our personal information.  While Facebook bears the brunt of our wrath and Mark Zuckerberg was called in front of a senate committee to answer questions.  The fact is that Facebook is not the only one collecting our personal information, they may not even be the worst of the lot.  Let’s look at our apps, technology and your information and how it is handled.

The apps we use

Grab your smartphone and take a look at the apps that you use everyday.  Everything from shopping apps, email and of course all the social media platforms that you belong to.  Every single one of them tracks you and how you shop, your birthday, things you love, people you admire, things you hate, your current location and even who you vote for.  These apps collate this information to target you with the right ads and the businesses you could potentially become a customer of.  Here is an overview of what is collected.

Online shopping

This goes even beyond having access to your personal information and just Facebook, let’s take a look at Amazon for a moment.  If you are a client of Amazon’s home security system, they can deliver packages inside your home rather than on the doorstep.  That means they have the ability to unlock your front door.  An alternative they recently announced was the ability to deliver packages to your car, which doesn’t sound bad in theory if you are at work all day.  However they are working with OnStar and using the unlock feature to deliver packages inside your car.  Not quite your home but it is still coming into your personal space when you aren’t there.

What should you do

Unless you plan on packing it in and going to live in a log cabin in the middle of the woods then to a certain degree you have to accept this aspect of technology.  As a business owner having this data at your fingertips allows you to streamline your business and market more effectively.  As a consumer you are going to be constantly marketed to, based on the apps you use and how you use them.  Your phone gives you the world’s knowledge at your fingertips and it has changed how we communicate and interact with each other.  It didn’t come without a cost.

 

How Will AI Change Technology?

TechnoAdmin
How Will AI Change Technology

Some of the biggest names in technology are coming together for research and development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but they are just the household names there are dozens of other lesser known tech companies working on it too.  What is it about AI that is prompting millions of dollars of investment and how can this impact our daily lives.  How will AI change technology, let’s have a look.

More Efficiency

Since the dawn of the industrial age we have used machines because they are more efficient than people.  They work faster and longer and they never get tired.  Now imagine what machines could do with artificial intelligence, they could make decisions with fewer errors.  There would be fewer delays with less problems all of which would make the machines effectively more efficient overall.

Intelligent Marketing

AI is already a part of marketing with the use of chatbots to help companies deal with customers.  Chatbots along with some other AI solutions can help take digital marketing to the next level, it can answer customer questions and be a part of interactive marketing.  It can answer repetitive questions without having to use human resources to do so.

Exploration

When it comes to the exploration of space or the bottom of the oceans, people have been limited by the harsh environment.  That is not the only limitation, our senses are ill equipped to deal with the vast input of data that is available.  There are sounds, patterns and frequencies that we as humans simply cannot perceive, machines don’t have these limitations.  Machines equipped with AI are fully capable of exploring and extrapolating data where we cannot.

New Opportunities

We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what AI can do, it has the capacity to completely change technology as we know it.  AI use has been limited thus far but what does it have the potential to do in the fields of medicine or finances.  Can we teach computers to perform complex surgeries? Are we ready for fully automated self-driving airplanes?  Will AI ever actually be able to create art or is that strictly a human characteristic?  As the use of AI grows so will the need for new applications.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the fastest growing sectors in technology, there is a reason that companies like Google, IBM and Facebook are pouring millions of dollars into research, this technology will continue to evolve in the future and perhaps offer a solution to some of our biggest problems.