AXEL.org

Lizzie Davey

Can Creatives Make Money from Their Passion?

Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

While this mantra inspires a sense of hope, for most people it’s also a slap in the face because they realize they’ll never get paid for doing something they love.

Making money from a passion is the holy grail for a lot of people – and why wouldn’t it be? Waking up each morning to spend the day doing something you’d do in your spare time anyway is an incredibly attractive prospect.

But then reality sets in.

We’ve all heard the story about the photographer who quits their office job to travel the world hunting for the Nat Geo shot that will change their life. Or the story about the writer who packs up their temporary job in a bar to work on their novel.

At the beginning, the passion levels are high and hopes are fully stacked. But after a couple of months, it’s the same old story. There’s no money coming in, that much-coveted Nat Geo shot hasn’t been found, and nobody has read the novel.

The photographer walks back into their old office with their tail between their legs to beg for their job back, and the writer is once again pulling pints six days a week.

Because getting paid for your passion is hard.

Why?

Because there are other people out there who are willing to do their passion for free.

Photographers take photos and upload them online for no money, writers share their stories on platforms that are totally free, and artists readily give their works to galleries to exhibit in exchange for absolutely nothing.

So when it comes to monetizing a creative passion, it is impossible – but only if you make it that way.

Love Isn’t Enough

If you asked a room full of people why they deserve to make money from their passion, I’m willing to bet the vast majority will say because they love it.

They truly believe that their love for it will bring in the money.

And while that does sometimes work, it’s absolutely not the norm.

In fact, most people suffer from this notion that if they love something hard enough it’ll fall into their lap.

But just because you are so incredibly passionate about something, it doesn’t mean that other people care about it in the same way.

Creatives all around the world forget to join up the dots between doing something they love and doing something other people care about. Without persuading other people to give a damn, you’re going to struggle to get people to part with their hard-earned cash.

But this is just one reason why a lot of people fail at monetizing their passion.

Monetizing Passion in the Wrong Way

Perhaps the biggest reason most people don’t make money doing what they love is because they have no idea how to make money doing what they love.

For creatives in particular, there are so many different ways to monetize what they do that they often fall into the trap of trying to do too many things – and they’re often the wrong things.

Let’s take a look at three of the main ways creatives try – and usually fail – to monetize their passion.

Advertising

Advertising is one of the simplest ways for creatives to earn a few bucks. It’s easy to set up and it works as a kind of passive income that keeps ticking away while they carry on with their craft.

Except that it’s incredibly difficult to earn any kind of decent money by relying on click-throughs from ads.

Take a writer who wants to monetize their words, for example.

They set up a blog and start writing about their favorite films and the latest movie releases in the hopes that at some point they’ll be able to earn some money from their reviews either by selling them to magazines or via the blog itself.

After a month or so they set up advertising on their site so that every time a visitor clicks on an ad, they earn a small amount of money.

The problem with this is it’s not the writer’s passion that’s making them the money, it’s the second-hand power of advertising. The writer isn’t making money directly from their words, instead they’re hoping people come to the site and click on an ad (which actually takes the visitor away from the site and the writer’s words).

Affiliate Sales

Then there’s affiliate sales.

This is when someone sells another person’s or brand’s products for a cut of the sale. So a photographer might share camera equipment on Amazon and, if anyone buys through their unique link, they’ll get a percentage of the sale price.

The problem here is that the photographer is selling someone else’s product or service; they’re not making money from their passion.

Marketplaces

Finally, creatives often upload their work to larger websites that already have big audiences to sell their wares to – think stock photo sites, for example.

When someone uploads a piece of content they’ve created and someone buys it, the site generally takes cut – usually 50% or more – but in return the creative gets access to a readymade audience.

So What’s the Solution? How Can Creatives Monetize Their Passion?

If you’re sticking to the above methods to earn some money from what you make, it might well be impossible to monetize your passion. Not because you don’t love it enough or because you’re failing, but because you’re not doing it the right way for you and your business.

Lots of people will tell you that you need to do this and do that to succeed, but every business is different – especially creative businesses. Slowly but surely, people are wising up to just how valuable the creative industries are and are starting to value the work of artists more and more.

Moving towards the model of selling directly to buyers can help eliminate middlemen and commission fees, but it’s worth trying out several different methods until you find one that works for your business.

What it boils down to is this: yes, it is impossible to monetize your passion if you don’t do it in the right way for you.

Burnout is Real: How Content Creators Can Stay Creative When Money is Involved

Imagine waking up in the morning not foggy-headed from the buzz of your alarm, but wide awake and ready to start the day. You grab a coffee, sit down at your easel, grab your camera, or flip open a fresh page in your notebook and get to work.

For many creatives, this is the dream.

But the harsh reality is that the vast majority won’t ever get to experience making a living from their passion, and will instead spend their lives cramming their creative pursuit into any spare moment they have.

But why is this paradox so true for artists, writers, and makers?

Isn’t there a saying that says if you love something enough the money will follow?

The truth is it’s incredibly hard for creatives to transition from creating for personal pleasure to creating for an audience or clients to a deadline and a budget.

As soon as you bring money into the equation, things get a lot more transactional and the bright sparks of creativity are often quashed under multiple revisions and the limited visions of agencies.

This is where burnout raises its ugly head.

When we start creating for others, we lose the drive that we had when we were creating for ourselves and this can drastically reduce our motivation levels.

In fact, psychological research shows that we are at our most creative when we are drive by intrinsic motivation (a.k.a. motivation that comes from within ourselves), whereas focusing on extrinsic motivation (a.k.a. money and fame) can instantly kill any sense of creativity we had in the first place.

And we’ve all felt pretty drab about a task that doesn’t excite us. When we’re not enamored by a project, it’s almost impossible to do our best work regardless of what reward lies on the other side.

As soon as you take your passion from the desk in your back room to the digital stage of the online world, negative thought patterns like comparisonitis and professional jealousy can consume large chunks of our creativity and lead to real-life burnout.

Why Creatives Experience Burnout When Money is Involved

The online world is an anonymous place where people can be anyone they want to be because they’re hidden away behind the safety of a screen. This is precisely why many online platforms place heavy emphasis on being authentic – and this carries over into the creative world, too.

We’re always told to stay “true to our art” and never sell out. Keep doing what we’re doing and the rewards will follow. Never change for anyone. If you do all that, your creative career will fall into your lap.

That’s a load of old hokey, though.

Making money from anything requires strategic thinking, forward planning, and a helluva lot of perseverance. Trial and error become your two best friends, and that’s before you remember that you have to actually sell something to make money.

For creatives, their passion is pure and authentic in the truest sense.

Even whisper the word marketing or sales and you’re immediately a sell-out or some kind of slick-haired, slimey salesman.

What it boils down to is this: as soon as creatives start selling their passion, whether it’s paintings, photographs, or books, they have to think about marketing and sales. It’s an inevitable part of business.

But thinking about marketing and sales also means studying competitors, comparing other brands, and – god forbid – asking people to buy from you. These things all suck away at creativity, leaving many artists and creators burnt out and feeling like absolute sell outs.

It’s Difficult to Make Money with Art

And then we also have to remember that the creative world is so subjective and at the mercy of buyers, which makes it incredibly difficult to make money with art in the first place.

Sure, there are a number of ways creatives get their business off the ground, like:

  • Selling their art through a stock site
  • Building an audience and selling work directly
  • Working through an agency who take a big fat commission
  • Freelancing for corporate brands

But when success doesn’t come instantly (which, just like with anything, it never does), creatives feel slighted and like they’re not good enough – cue burnout and feelings of inferiority.

How to Get Back on Track After Burnout

If you’re in the depths of burnout and are ready to claw your way out of the slump and try again, we’ve got some tricks up our sleeve for you.

Remember, Creativity is a Muscle

We aren’t born with a swirling mass of creativity inside us. Just like anything, practice makes perfect because creativity is a muscle.

When you’re experiencing burnout you’re not giving your creativity a workout, which leads you deeper and deeper into the spiral.

But just like you wouldn’t go all out at the gym after three months away from it, you shouldn’t try and dive in headfirst with your creativity. Instead, you need to flex that muscle regularly and gently to make it stronger.

When you look at it like this, you can see that burnout is simply an injury that needs nurturing back to health.

Mix Up Your Creative Input

Burnout leads to less output. Fact. And, according to Austin Kleon’s piece Problems of Output Are Problems of Input, that means you simply need to mix up what you’re putting in.

What does that mean?

It means that if you’re a photographer, you tend to consume all the content to do with photography, like how to get better, how to improve your shots, how this photographer made millions with one picture, and so on.

But when you do this, you’re creating a bubble of same-ness which doesn’t stimulate the brain. To really get those creative juices flowing, you need to broaden your horizons and consume content that’s categorically not related to your discipline.

Break Things Up

As creatives, we tend to only see the bigger picture. We have this end vision in mind and we know we want to get there, but we often don’t know how.

This can lead to feelings of paralysis as we struggle to make the first step towards our big goal.

To avoid this, you can break things down into smaller tasks. Still think about that big, heart-soaring vision, but also think about the little steps you can take to get you there and work on one of them every day or every week.

Burnout is Probably (and Unfortunately) Inevitable  

Burnout is often an inevitable part of life for creatives, particularly those who want to be paid for their passion.

But, like with any business, thinking strategically and taking things day by day will help you get over the paralysis and black slump of burnout and thrive in a way that’s contagious.

Do Your Apps Know Too Much About You?

Two years ago something incredible happened.

A simple computer game brought the world together and got gamers out and about into the big wide world. But after the immediate rush of excitement about “catching ‘em all”, users started to realize something a little more sinister about the Pokemon Go app.

As well as letting them throw imaginary Pokeballs in real-life locations, the iOS version of the app was caught accessing almost all of users’ Google account information – everything from emails down to photos.

Two years later, Mark Zuckerberg made a statement about the vague data collection techniques apps were using through Facebook. He was keen to iterate that Facebook does use sound clips from videos recorded directly onto Facebook to serve relevant ads after questions around this became louder and louder.

But his statement wasn’t exhaustive enough in covering what exactly our apps know about us.

This is because of the ambiguous nature of app permissions.

They tend to be oversimplified so as not to overwhelm the user, but below the simple sentences and soothing reassurances they can gather a huge amount of data with every single interaction.

Of course, some data collected is absolutely necessary for the apps to work in the first place. For example, a photo app won’t work if it can’t access your photos, and Uber needs your location information so it can pick you up in the right place – duh.

But once you give apps that need information access to your data, they can start to worm their way under the surface to dig out more and more information about you and your behavior.

Take location access as an example.

Once you give away your location, app makers are then able to use that information to figure out what floor of a high-rise you live on or the places you visit the most.

Why Apps Want Your Data

Data is gold for app makers. With information about their user base, apps can perform all sorts of other actions, like:

  • This is the key activity app makers do with the data they’ve gathered. Knowing everything about you means they can serve up relevant ads and charge advertisers more and more for being so highly targeted.
  • Curated content. This keeps users sticking around for more. If they’re seeing more of what they like, they’re more likely to engage with the content and keep coming back for more.
  • App development. Data can be really useful for knowing what users do and don’t like, which can be used in the future to improve the app or make another app altogether.

A whopping one-third of consumers don’t think advertisers collect data from them.

App Permissions: What Do Your Apps Know About You?

Now you know why your apps might want to scrape together the digital breadcrumbs of you, let’s take a look at what they actually know about you, because it can be easy to jump to conclusions and envision a Big Brother type scenario which often isn’t the case.

Your smartphone is actually packed full of sensors which can decipher your whereabouts, what speed you’re traveling at (including what form of transport you’re traveling on), and which way up you’re using your phone.

But you’re not completely powerless.

This is where app permissions come in, a.k.a. the “barrier” between app makers and the data stored in your phone. When a pop-up shows up on your phone with a permission request, it’s up to you to decide how much data you pour into the hands of the app maker.

However, this is easier said than done, and that’s because very few apps give detailed explanations about what information they’re going to collect and use.

Many app makers do this in the interest of their users; they don’t want to overwhelm them with technical drivel, so they keep it simple. But this means that a lot of users don’t actually know the full extent of what they’ve agreed to.

If you want to know exactly what an app can and can’t see about you, there’s a way.

On an Android device:

  • Open the settings app
  • Go to the Apps & Notifications center
  • Choose an app and click Permissions

On an iOS device:

  • Go to the Settings app
  • Choose an app
  • See the Permissions that are listed

On both kinds of devices, you can usually switch off permissions with a toggle button to pick and choose what data can and can’t be collected (though bear in mind that some apps need certain permissions in order to run).

And, though this is a good starting point to find out what your apps know about you, it doesn’t always give you the full story.

Take the incident with Uber recently, where it was discovered that the app was secretly recording screen activity on iPhones. The company hit back that this was to improve functionality with the Apple Watch app, but it just goes to show that even if you think you know what an app can find out about you, there might be something more sinister going on.

How Are Things Changing When It Comes to Apps and Data?

Phone providers are now cracking down on what app makers can and can’t do when it comes to permissions – particularly location permissions.

When requesting location access, app makers now have to adhere to the “only when using the app” rule, which means they can’t track users when they’re not inside the app.

But while control settings are getting tighter, they’re also getting more and more convoluted. App makers are starting to bundle permission choices together and still aren’t quite there with letting their users know exactly what they’ll be using data for.

Apps that require users to “unlock” a particular permission in order to use the app as it’s supposed to be used are doing so without giving away whether they might share it with marketers and advertisers too.

What it boils down to is this: people have every right to choose what they do and don’t want apps to access, but there’s not much they can do if the app in question needs their location or access to their photos to work as they’re supposed to.

In these instances, it’s up to the user to decide whether they want to continue to use the app or give it up entirely.

And, until app makers get clearer with what they use data for, many users will remain in the dark about what data app companies are collecting about them and what they’re doing with that information.

A Beginner’s Guide to Staying Safe Online

Every week it seems a new security breach is hitting the headlines so we can be forgiven for thinking the online world is a dangerous place.

Earlier this year, Facebook was lambasted for sharing user data with third party apps, while those with Androids were shocked to learn that their mobile was tracking their every move thanks to built-in location tracking tacked onto Maps and Photos.

And then there was the Amazon Echo incident, where customers realized their every interaction was being gathered together to build a case about who they are and their shopping habits.

So yes, we’d be forgiven for thinking the online world is a scary place.

Sure, the internet has impacted our lives in amazing ways, but there is a dark side just like with everything else.

But because we’ve been so eager to dip our toes into the countless benefits that the internet brings (being able to communicate with anyone, anywhere is pretty priceless), we’ve lost some of our personal privacy along the way. It’s kind of an exchange – we let you do this in exchange for this information about yourself.

This isn’t about to stop anytime soon.

We like the freedom to contact someone on the other side of the world with the click of a button. We like being able to next-day-deliver something we’ve coveted for all of five minutes. We like being able to read our favorite news stories without having to shell out for a hard copy.

Handing over our data for online freedom is the price we pay. Everything we do on the web leaves a digital trail that can be swept up and used by corporations and governments.

The problem is in the transparency of it all. Legalese in tiny fonts that are unreadable with the naked eye pull the wool over users’ eyes. We want to sign up to Twitter so we can see what everyone’s saying about the latest celebrity scandal, so we blindly tick the “yes” box without really agreeing to have our data scraped through and sold on for who knows what purpose.

Giving away even the tiniest snippets of data about yourself can leave you at risk from less-than-stellar companies, but there are steps you can take to limit how much data is siphoned from your internet activity.

If you’re not tech savvy and don’t know how to navigate the ins and outs of the World Wide Web, let us help you out.

Encrypt Your Email

Email is not going anywhere anytime soon. In 2017, more than 270 billion emails were sent, a number that’s set to increase to 320 billion by 2020.

We hear all the time about email accounts getting hacked, and this form of online communication has been hailed as the absolute worst for security. This is because a single email message gets passed around several different servers before it reaches its final destination.

You can keep the content of your messages private with encryption. Some email providers already offer this as standard, but for others you might need to download an add-on or a plugin. When it comes to the metadata that accompanies your emails though (the sender, receiver, time stamps etc), there’s nothing you can do as the internet routing system needs this information to do its job.

Hide Your History

We often get sucked into a wormhole on the internet and find ourselves knee deep in cute cat videos when all we wanted was to find a review for the new washing machine we’ve got our eye on.

It’s hard to believe that anyone would be interested in the meandering trail we took to get to the cat videos, but this information can be used by companies to know what sites we visit the most and how we get from one to the other.

This log of sites you visit is known as your “clickstream”, and you can take a look right now at the online journey you’ve taken over the past day by simply clicking “History” and then “Full Browsing History” when your browser is open.

This information isn’t private unless you always browse the web in Incognito mode so the sites don’t retain your Cookies (watch the video below to understand what Cookies are), or to download a free tool that obscures your clickstream.

Video:

Get Savvy with Your Social

It always seems to be social media sites hitting the headlines with privacy concerns (we’re looking at you, Facebook), and that’s because social channels are filled with a bounty of information about their users; from date of birth to restaurants you regularly check into and your closest friends, these sites literally have an incredible low-down on you.

But again, it’s the price we pay to stay in the loop and to share filtered pics with our nearest and dearest.

The best advice here for eliminating any chance of your data being scraped and used elsewhere is to delete all of your social media accounts.

If that seems too drastic, give yourself peace of mind by having your accounts on the highest security settings possible (here’s a great guide to help you do that) and leaving out any identifying information like your date of birth or your home town.

We can’t control what others post on social media (and sometimes they’ll post stuff about us that disappears into the ether), but we can control what we hand over to the grasping hands of big corporations.

Leave Your Location Out of It

There’s something thrilling about checking into a new place, whether we’re humblebragging about visiting the latest high-end restaurant or simply want people to know that we’re Out There Having Fun.

But location data can be incredibly valuable if it falls into the right hands.

Think about it: not only are you providing information about where you are and what you’re doing there, you’re handing over data like what time of day you like to do that activity, and you’re even giving nearby locations the chance to target you with ads while you’re in the vicinity.

The answer here is simple: turn off your location when you don’t need it and avoid using sites that require you to “check in” or need location information.

Other Things You Can Do

Encrypting your email, being elusive with your social media information, and avoiding the lure of “checking in” are good starting points for protecting your online data privacy.

But, taking it further, you can ensure that your password across everything is not something that can easily be guessed. Instead of having a password, go for a passphrase that is made up of multiple words, numbers, and symbols.

And, when it comes to your search engine habits, be ruthless.

Many of the big search engines make a note of your searches and build a profile of you to serve up relevant ads. If you want to avoid this, you need to avoid the big guys and instead use a search engine that doesn’t track your every search term (the oddly-named DuckDuckGo is good for this).

Protecting online data is a big concern for most internet users, but for the tech-phobic it can be truly terrifying, especially if you don’t even know how to start protecting yourself.

Hopefully these tips will point you in the right direction and help you get your privacy back under control, pronto.

The Hidden Danger of Virtual Worlds

On a summer afternoon, a number of Microsoft employees were invited to attend a training seminar.

But, instead of grabbing a pen and heading to the boardroom, they plugged themselves into a set of headphones and fired up Second Life.

This online social “game” was huge for a number of years in the early 00s, mainly because it offered average, everyday citizens an escape from the monotony of real life. Through a digitized landscape, users could create new “lives” that were as hedonistic as they chose.

For Microsoft employees, the pixelated replica of the Microsoft building was the location of their training seminar. But it wasn’t just Microsoft that jumped on the bandwagon – big-name rock stars lined up to perform virtual gigs and real-life travel companies sent correspondents into the melee to report on the latest developments.

For all intents and purposes, Second Life was real life – except you could enjoy it from the comfort of your own home.

The “game” (a term which should be used loosely in this context because, well, there’s actually no way to win at Second Life) was inspired by Snow Crash, the 1992 novel by Neal Stephenson. In the book, citizens navigate around a digital world created and run by independent entrepreneurs – a concept that’s becoming more and more real by the day.

The purpose of Second Life isn’t to gather as many gold coins as possible or figure out a mission set by a wiry old wizard. Instead, it is simply a digital escapist fantasy that allows users to be whoever they want and do whatever they want away from the restrictions of the real world.

While the possibilities were (and still are) endless in Second Life, one phenomenon was quick to surface; that normal people submersing themselves in the game were acting pretty much the same as they would in real life. This made it a fascinating environment to study the social behaviors of people in a pre-built stage.

Sure, stories emerged of people having affairs on Second Life that affected real-world marriages but, for the most part, people used it to escape reality and… do pretty much the same as they were doing in their real lives.

What is the Metaverse?

Let’s backtrack for a minute.

The Metaverse is a term that dates back to Stephenson’s sci-fi novel. It was the name given to the virtual world in which the characters interacted and lived, and it’s now the term being given to a blockchain project that essentially aims to replicate the real world in a digitized format.

In Snow Crash, “players” moved around as Avatars while the central strip – known as “the Street” – could be built on by developers, creating an even more entangled version of reality.

The goal of the Metaverse project is to build an entire universe where digital assets and digital identities are the basis of transactions to create a new kind of ecosystem that has the potential to completely change human society.

Even back in 1992, Stephenson had an insightful eye into what the future might hold for humanity. Today, our lives resemble those of the characters in the book – our work and lives are becoming more and more digitized, with people spending more time online than offline.

The way we communicate has undergone a complete transformation, where we now send clipped messages via the internet rather than having to face talking to real people. Soon, we might see even more transfers – both human and asset based – taking place on the blockchain which will shift the entire economic world.

It can be a hard pill to swallow, but some might argue we’re already halfway there. Enter the New Reality.

With people increasingly living their lives out online, there’s one big elephant in the room that keeps bubbling away below the surface – data privacy.

The Metaverse and its Effect on Data Privacy

In the real world, we don’t have to enter a username and a password to wake up in the morning and, when we pass people on the street, our full names and addresses aren’t typed out in a bubble above our heads.

Online it’s a different story. And, in fact, with the likes of Second Life and social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, users seem to be actively willing to hand over their information to access their feeds.

This raises the question of whether privacy will soon be regarded as an outdated social need or whether it will evolve into something else entirely. At the moment, the rules of the online world are considerably more open and vague than those in the real world, but this might have to change when the Metaverse comes into play.

Why?

Because so far, most virtual reality games and landscapes are built in a “walled garden” format. They run behind corporate firewalls and aren’t interconnected in any way. When you enter one world, you’re essentially caged in and avatars can’t travel between two different digital worlds. In this case, security isn’t necessarily a priority, because data isn’t being transferred from the hands of one corporation to another.

The problem arises when virtual worlds are built on open source software. This means avatars can travel between different virtual landscapes. And, for now, the majority of these platforms are built by developers in their spare time, which means that security is a low priority for them.

Take OpenSimulator, as an example. This software powers over 300 different public worlds and even more private ones, covering an area of 15,000 square kilometers. The software means anyone can set up a virtual world via the Oculus Rift without having to break the bank.

MOSES, one of the worlds built with OpenSimulator, is owned by the US Army, and the problems with security are already doing the rounds. At the moment, it’s difficult to know how to go about addressing data security issues when this new digital landscape is so new (despite its fictional origin in the 90s).

For now, it seems, the Metaverse is an experimental place to dabble in the future of humanity. The fresh excitement of it and the relatively unknown future it holds means security isn’t necessarily a priority for developers.

But soon, when more and more people start venturing into their online lives, we’ll have to sit down and seriously think about what data privacy means in this new landscape, particularly when it comes to things like authentication, content protection, and secure communications.

But, if Second Life is anything to go by, the population of people who are ready and willing to escape reality and immerse themselves in an online parallel universe are more concerned with who they will be there than who will take their information.

Protect Data Privacy by NOT Collecting Data at All

In Hansel and Gretel, the two siblings sprinkle breadcrumbs as they venture into the woods in order to find their way home.

When we browse the internet, we sprinkle metaphorical breadcrumbs of information about ourselves as we go. Unlike the fairytale, where Hansel and Gretel knew what they were doing, the vast majority of internet users are unaware of just how much information they’re giving away on their journey around the web.

Unless you’ve got blockers installed up to your ears, the tracking starts as soon as you open up an internet browser. From that moment, your digital footprints carve a route around the web that can be traced back to you at any moment.

Sites you visit can use these footprints (or breadcrumbs, if we’re sticking with the fairytale theme) to recognize who you are and serve you a more personalized experience.

That sounds great, right?

In one study, 71% of consumers said they’d prefer a personalized experience with ads, while some even expected it from brands. And the easiest way for sites to personalize those experiences is to track the interests and online behaviors of visitors.

From that perspective it works; the consumer gets a personalized experience and brands get to give their customers what they want. It’s a win-win situation.

But is it really that simple?

I mean, we’re not talking epic government data mining expeditions here; we’re simply talking about brands using specific information to better target content to their users. It’s all above board and totally legal.

So what kind of data can these companies get from you?

It can be anything from your current location and the device you’re using to specific links you’re clicking on and the actions you take on certain sites. It all starts with your browser and your IP address – the moment you pop up online, a unique number that identifies the device you’re using is recorded, marking the moment you entered the internet and where you were when you went online.

At the same time, your browser is logged as well as other uniquely identifying information like the system you’re running the browser on, the display resolution, and even the battery level of your device. Even if you haven’t clicked your mouse or typed anything in yet, you’re already being tracked.

Who Benefits from Collecting Data?

I mentioned earlier that data collection can be mutually beneficial. Consumers don’t have to see ads that they’d never buy from in a million years, while websites can get more information on their visitors to make experiences more personalized and, therefore, get more sales.

But who is it really more beneficial for? If we really get down to the bottom of it, who is really getting the most out of the dissemination of data?

Personalized experiences are nice, right? But are they worth the data breaches that happen and the inevitability that brands will sell that data to completely unrelated companies just to make a quick buck?

Let’s face it: most sites are eager to scrape as much information as they can about their visitors with the sole purpose of making more money. Sure, the thought process might be there to make experiences more enjoyable by personalizing them, but really the goal here is to target more.

Look at Facebook. The data it collects as you browse the site can determine when you’re expecting your firstborn, the exact names and addresses of the companies you’ve worked for in the past, and even your political leaning.

And guess what?

It doesn’t just collect this data to get to know you better as if you’re on some kind of weird, digital first date. It collects it to sell to companies to make money through advertising.

So yes, there are benefits to the consumer; you might not have to pick a particular city every time you want to get the weather because it’s remembered your past choices, or you might not have to shop again for those items you left in your online basket last week, but these benefits are minor compared to the massive benefits companies and sites get from tracking your every move.

Where the Lines Get Hazy…

Of course there are browser security protocols in place that mean sites can’t just go around scraping all sorts of stuff about you. In fact, for the most part, sites can only access the data they’ve collected – as in, they can only see the information you’ve “given” them while you’ve been on their site.

However, something called third-party cookies muddy the waters. These aren’t associated with any particular site, but instead get spread across a number of different pages in, say, an ad network.

Princeton University ran a study that found cross-site trackers embedded in 482 of the top 50,000 sites on the web. It might not seem like a lot in the great scheme of things, but once these third-party trackers have consumer information they can then sell it to even more people.

While the most sensitive data is redacted from these apps, consumers are still having to put their trust into a nameless, faceless brand.

But what about the data that consumers are handing over willingly?

Things like Google searches and checking into venues on Facebook?

While sites might be collecting information like which browser you’re using and what your shopping preferences are, you’ve probably handed over more sensitive information like your birth date and exact location without even giving it a second thought.

Does the Future Lie in NO Data Collection?

In May this year, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) came into play in Europe. It means that brands now have to explicitly state to their users exactly what information they are collecting and exactly what they will be doing with it.

Users now have to actively opt-in to providing their information; sites can’t just take it for nothing. Already countries outside of Europe are considering this new method because, well, it just seems like the right thing to do.

But what does it mean for the future of data collection?

Now that users are more aware of their rights when it comes to data collection and have to actively “opt-in” with their information, they are becoming less and less inclined to do so.

If there’s an option to not sell your firstborn, it’s kind of a given that you’re going to go for that, right?

In this instance, the future of data collection looks bleak – especially for sites and brands. If their users aren’t giving up the goods, they’ve got nothing to work with and essentially have to go back to the drawing board.

This might invite new ways of collecting data or a more collaborative approach between consumers and brands so that information can travel between the two in an open and honest way.

The future of data privacy is uncertain for now, especially so soon after GDPR has risen its head. What we do know is that the power will be distributed more evenly between internet users and brands, and sites will no longer be able to take, take, take without building more of a relationship with their visitors.

It sounds quite nice, actually.

But would a world without any data tracking or collection be good? If every person who went online immediately went incognito, leaving not a single trace of who they are or what they’re doing, how would the digital world evolve? How would companies know what their consumers want? How would internet users cope with having to start from scratch every time they went back online?

The questions remain endless, but it’ll be interesting to see which path data collection goes down from here on out.