Chances are that you are almost always being “watched” almost all of the time, even if it is just a bot stalking you online. Online you can be hacked, stalked, and much worse on your favorite social media outlets. The only problem is when the social media sites, that you are trusting, start collecting and sharing your data without your permission.

What is psychographics? When asked in a survey 59% of Bob Jones students said that they know what psychographics are, but that still leaves a significant amount of people unsure or completely lost. According to The Business Dictionary, psychographics as the collection of personal data used by companies to send you ads picked specifically for you.

The personal data that is collected would consist of your “likes” and pictures you look at online or through social media. Facebook collects psychographics or as one Bob Jones student, Douglas Zhang said, “Facebook, perving on your private info for dat sweet sweet ad money.”

But can psychographics be categorized into right or wrong? To really analyze psychographics we have to take in all opinions and possibilities offered by it. According to the survey, only 41% of the students believe that psychographics are wrong in general, while 46% of the survey takers said that psychographics is “all right.”

When asked about psychographics, Mrs. Panagos, a teacher here at Bob Jones said, “I think it’s an effective tool because it goes beyond who the consumer is as a basic demographic. They’re helpful to many businesses and campaigns.”

Linda Hannah is a teacher of Psychology at UAH and Calhoun Community College; she is also a devoted Facebook user. She said, “I don’t need anyone to come up and try and sell me stuff. It is like being in a store and having two people come up and say, ‘What can I help you with? What can I help you with?’ I don’t need their help anymore; they’ve trained us to be independent thinkers on the consumer market. I would like more choices so that we could opt-out of it.”

Psychographics: the collection of data for companies to send more specific ads so that they may gain more customers. It isn’t widely considered “wrong,” but it many people will not view it as though it is “all right.”

The real problem is that many people are uninformed or ignorant of psychographics. Those ignorant of psychographics are the ones who feel offended when they later learn about all the data that has been collected from them. Most people don’t even realize that their social media collects some of their data.

Sites that collect data should make a better effort to be transparent about collecting  data. Once users are aware, they can take the necessary precautions with their personal information and be more careful online knowing that what they look at is being recorded.

Psychographics: you may love them or you may hate them. In some cases, psychographics are considered useful to businesses, but most of the time they are more of a nuisance to the end user.