Ask Leo! #600 – Backup Programs, Uncaught Exploit, Windows Live Mail 2012, and more…

I completely agree: privacy is something we need to start paying more attention to. I'm not talking about "Microsoft is spying on me" type paranoia, but rather the big picture implications of the fact that so much of our data is now held in databases and subject to being sold, traded and aggregated, sometimes without our knowledge and consent. Some comments I made in relation to another post....

To take this a little further, I'll add that most people have little understanding about the extent to which they're tracked. You've got companies collecting social data and aggregating it with financial information, purchase history records obtained via customer loyalty programs as well as numerous other data points/sources (search: data brokers). You've got companies tracking you across whatever devices you use, irrespective of your cookie/privacy/telemetry settings (search: probabilistic cross-device tracking). You've got companies tracking you in a whole bunch of other ways - some overt, some covert. And all of this happens in what is very much a legal grey area with little legislative control or oversight. You've got no idea which companies track you, no idea what data they hold about you, no control what they do with that data and no ability to correct inaccuracies.

Currently, this tracking is predominantly used for the purpose of serving up targeted advertising, which probably isn't too much of a problem is many peoples' eyes (mine included). However, it can be used for other purposes too. Online retailers already use demographics/profiles in order to adjust pricing on a per-customer basis (the price you see may not be the same as the price that I see). Travel comparison sites have even been found to display higher prices to Mac users (Mac users have a higher average income than Windows users, so are likely to be willing to pay more). Target used purchase history records - of things like calcium, magnesium, unscented moisturizers and charcoal-flavored ice cream - to work out which customers were pregnant (search: Target pregnancy). How much longer before picking up a friend's anti-cancer meds - and putting it on your CVS loyalty card - starts affecting your life insurance premiums? There have even been instances of data brokers selling information to criminals who subsequently used it to fraudulently withdraw millions of dollars from peoples' bank accounts (search: FTC vs LeapLab).

Of course, it's not all doom and gloom. Data collection/big data has the potential to be enormously beneficial. Never before have we had access to so much data about people on such a massive scale, and that data can certainly be put to good use. For example, aggregating the data from fitness tracking devices - such as Fitbits - with social and socioeconomic data pulled from other sources could provide us with an unprecedented level of insight into how a wide range of issues affect our health and wellness.

The bottom line is that pretty much every aspect of our lives is recorded in a database somewhere: where we shop, what we buy, how much we exercise, what our heart rates are, how many flights of stairs we climb in a day, how much money we have, how much we owe, who we're friends with, what we read, what we search for, etc., etc., etc. And all of that data is subject to nebulous privacy policy policies - that companies can change without notice - and is subject to be sold, traded and aggregated, either in anonymized or non-anonymized form. We need to start thinking about how we want that data to be used, who we want to be able to access it and put a proper legislative framework in place to ensure that it isn't misused.

As Spider-Man once said, 'With big data comes big responsibility' (okay, maybe that's not exactly what he said, but it's nonetheless true).