A project of the Integrity InstituteProfile Building is a common strategy for monetizing platforms and a broadly unpopular privacy harm. In it, companies track user activity and behavior as they use a platform in order to build a trove of data that can be used to predict user behavior, typically with the aim of engendering further user attention or maximizing advertising revenue.
Profile building on platforms is categorized as a harm here because it is typically against the stated interests of their users, despite users' tacit assent.
Even for the many platforms that have baked this approach into their business model, design thinking has a role to play. Platforms can offer users a variety of interventions that have the potential to lessen the degree to which they see profile building as harmful, and in this way, design can be a way to ameliorate users' most acute concerns, while still enabling platforms to turn a profit.