Can You Ever Imagine – A Future without Privacy
The most intimate of your secrets and personal information are available for sale unless you live in a cave and have never had a computer or smartphone.
Today, you are well aware that every online activity is gleaned, packaged, and resold for a variety of purposes.
People fail to realize just how quickly online privacy invasions are evolving!
Concerns about Online Privacy Are Increasing
In the past, you were told that online businesses safeguard your privacy and that they do not share personal information about their users with third parties, even though they may sell data in an anonymous or aggregated form.
There has been a breach of that “red line” of privacy protection over the past few years.
An example is NeuStar, an analytics and information business.
Today, businesses use personal information from individuals to sell them products, provided to them by NeuStar.
An online streaming platform website can determine a visitor named Pete lives in New York, visits Florida twice a year, replays Cinderella every night, and belongs to one OTT Prime program by using NeuStar’s “Authoritative Identity” system. In addition, they know Pete owns a mobile phone, laptop, tablet, and P.O. Box, has no landline, and owns four different email addresses.
No doubt NeuStar has a lot of information about Pete and maybe even a lot of other Petes, as well as all their full names. There is nothing private about Pete and all the private details about this man have been packaged, marketed, and monetized.
Data Mining Taken To the Next Level
The technology of data mining helps companies target their offerings to consumers based on the data they collect from them.
Data mining reached new heights with the advent of Big Data. There was no affordable computing, database, and storage technology that could handle the massive volume of data that Big Data produced. With the introduction of big data software like Hadoop in 2006, data mining was able to handle quantities of data previously too large to handle and was introduced to a new world of possible data sets.
It is now big business to deal with Big Data. The companies that own this technology know everything about us – and sometimes even more than we do. Their use of machine learning techniques processes all of the personal data that has been aggregated.
Data mining software used by Target found out a pregnant young woman before her father even knew about her pregnancy? That was four years ago when technological development was in its infancy. It is amazing what companies are now able to determine about us with all the advancements in data mining since then.
What’s more? It’s about to be possible to overcome the biggest limitation of Big Data. The solution of Hadoop was to analyze large amounts of data through software. However, a new bottleneck arises- hardware.
Data volumes will increase by orders of magnitude in the coming decades due to computers’ inability to hold more data in memory. You don’t even realize how much your online privacy and personal information are being sliced and diced, sold and bought, in ways you can’t even imagine.
Think of all the behavioral information you could obtain about yourself if every email you send, every website you scroll, every credit card transaction you make were fed into an AI engine that analyzes the data.
Technological Breaches
Up until now, we have only discussed how your data can be legally used. Imagine how many databases contain your personal information. Every week, it seems that new high-profile data breaches are taking place involving the theft of personal information. Whether the objective is to steal from you or your company, your private information is packaged up and sold.
Cybercriminals target more than just databases. Private and business data is stored in telecommunications, email, and instant messaging systems. Because of this, these platforms are easy targets for cyber-crooks, especially when employees bring their smartphones to work, bringing consumer-oriented technology with them.
The Takeaway!
It’s no secret that data miners will want to incorporate information from your car or refrigerator into their datasets if those devices provide information about you. With the Internet of Things, digital privacy will be intruded upon on a dramatic scale in the future!
Author Bio
Neha Singh is the Founder & CEO of Securium Solutions with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. She is skilled in ECSA, Vulnerability Management, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Management, and Business Development. She loves traveling and trekking.
Friwol India Launches Syba on Amazon
