As Australians store and share more information online, it's becoming increasingly easy for big corporations to know everything about you without ever having met you.
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A Brisbane audience heard on Wednesday how a combination of loyalty programs, social media activity, purchase histories and more could create a "really accurate" picture of who you are, raising concerns for what could happen to that information in the future.
A panel including ABC managing director Mark Scott, Griffith University School of Technology head Professor Michael Blumenstein and Brisbane chief digital officer Cat Matson met to discuss 'Who's googling you?' and what that means for privacy.
Professor Blumenstein said people were increasingly swiping loyalty cards and signing up to online services without considering where their data was going.
"You've got these multiple sources of information coming in and we're at a stage now where we could get the information that you shopped here, you bought a flight here, you've done this and that, and all the websites that you've searched all in one go to sort of tell a really accurate story about you," he said.
There are options out there to attempt to restrict the data companies gather about you but their effectiveness is heavily debated.
Beyond that, it's not clear whether people care enough about these pictures being painted to use them.
In 2013, the respected Pew Research Centre found 59 per cent of Americans thought people should have the ability to use the internet completely anonymously but only 18 per cent had taken steps to hide or mask their identity online.
Michael Burton, CEO of Brisbane-founded media company Cutting Edge, took the concerns a step further, flagging the need for changes to privacy laws.
"I think the conversation has to become more about not who's collecting data, but the privacy laws have to change to make sure it's very transparent," he said.
"Which means that if data is being collected about me and I've signed up for it, I should have the right to know where that data is being used, what it's actually saying about me, who it's being sold to."
But it wasn't all doom and gloom, with the panelists also pointing out the benefits online data could provide, including more relevant ads and more interesting news.
"I get a whole lot of ads in my Facebook feed about shoes, not about Viagra," Ms Matson said.
But she countered this with concerns greater personalisation of online content, especially news, could severely limit what she was exposed to.
"I actually won't get exposed to new ideas," she said.
"I won't get exposed to news items that I should know about as an informed citizen of the world.
"I'll only keep getting the stuff that google, amazon, facebook, whatever the next social media platform is, that they think I'm going to interact with."
Throughout the event, the panelists seemed to straddle the line between the exciting opportunities increased data collection could bring and the potential consequences if it was used the wrong way in the future.