It is harmful but essential  

Taiwo Blessing Ogunseyi, a 35-year-old Nigerian lecturer  

With the widespread use of data analytics and machine learning, the collection of users' information becomes essential for service providers. As insights can be extracted from the data, informed decisions can be made, and targeted marketing can be done.

I believe that personal information is information that is unique to an individual or something that can be used to track an individual. Such information may be as confidential as health record, social security number, bank details, or as particular as names, gender, user's IP address, past search queries, shopping histories, user's location, or user's clicks. Generally, users' personal information is used to recommend personalized products and services to an individual user. In my opinion, the approach helps users to easily filter through the overload of information about products and services, get recommendations for products and services that they might like but are not aware of, and ultimately reduce their search time. However, as good as these sound, they all come at the expense of users' privacy.

Gradually, users are becoming mindful of their online privacy and how their personal information is being used by service providers. I think that service providers should be able to assure users of the privacy of their personal information when obtained and used.

The breach of users' privacy has several implications on the users, in addition to its loss of reputation and trust on the service providers. Some of the implications of leakage of users' privacy include financial loss, reputational damage, and the loss of sensitive and confidential data. In my point of view, since the collection of users' information helps to provide personalized recommendations, service providers should only collect users' personal information that is needed.

They are stealing from users 

Shang Huimin, a 29-year-old high school teacher in Shenzhen 

I don't think it is evil in nature for online services to collect personal information, for it helps improve service quality and does bring convenience to our life. However, the current way of information collection can be disturbing.

In one typical case, several fancy dresses appeared on the first page in one of my shopping apps right after I talked about buying one for the coming New Year party with my friends, though I hadn't searched for clothes yet. I thought it was just a coincident, but when I heard similar stories from others, it dawned on me that our shopping apps are eavesdropping without our knowledge, which seems creepy at the first thought.

The astonishment and curiosity drove me to figure out how these shopping apps have managed to do this. As I learned from an online community and a friend working in a tech company, shopping apps can use the speakers of their users' smartphones without informing them with an agreement. They can record our talks silently in our living room even when we don't turn on our speakers. To protect our private conversations, we need to deny them access to our speakers or cameras when installing it at the very beginning.

However, this is asking too much from the users. Protecting privacy should be the responsibility of tech companies and the government, preferably in a technological approach. Blockchain, for example, may be a solution. As I learned about it, this technology allows users to fully control their personal data and prevents any collection or use of such data without user consent.

In addition, users should be paid for any use of their personal information, since it is something that belongs to the users and using them is indeed commercially valuable. If leaked personal data can be sold at the black market, why should Internet services get them from users for free?