I love You Tube, Google, Twitter and for years have felt if they want to track my 200 episode obsession with Turkish period dramas or cat video likes then so be it. I’m not doing anything wrong so why would I care how it impacts my privacy? I then came across this quote in Oliver Stone’s Snowden movie and thought it was time to look into it further.
Saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you don’t have anything to say.
Edward Snowden
So what are they doing with your data?
An outraged father stormed into a well known US store to speak to the manager because the marketing team had sent his school age daughter discount vouchers for baby clothes and cribs. The store apologised profusely and said they would look into. A few days later the father called back to apologise and explain that his daughter was indeed pregnant.
Targeting is one of the most common uses of big data. The marketing department that so offended the pregnant girl’s father probably used a process like this:
- Segment – They purchased a list of new mothers or asked some to come forward as part of a survey. Next they found who on that list also had a store loyalty card or used a payment card
- Profile – Using payment or loyalty card data they could draw up a list of common product combinations these women had purchased while pregnant eg unscented lotions, folic acid, handbags that are big enough to hold nappies etc
- Engage – Looking at other customers who were buying those product combinations they generated a list of people who were probably pregnant and sent them Facebook adverts, coupons or email promotions
- Measure – Collected commission / bonus because of increased sales and boasted how good their predictive models were
Google, Facebook and many others hold vast stores of data about huge numbers of people which can be used to target you on the off chance that you might want to buy a washing machine 3 weeks after you searched for one online and then purchased in store. Some people find that creepy I find it clumsy but if they want to use my data for that broadly speaking I am not that bothered.
Can you trust large corporations to look after your data?
Half my life’s photos are on Facebook, when I needed to prove to my relationship status to the Australian government for visa purposes I used my Facebook timeline which showed over 5 years of dating with timestamps, places and photos. That is useful data to me, Facebook store it and make it easy for me to share. In return they know where I go out, who I hang out with, where I live, likes, dislikes, opinions on political issues, products I buy second hand on market place.
All of that sounded like a good idea when I first started using the site but since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Equifax data breach and Sony hack there are some companies that I don’t trust anymore and I would like my data back please, it is the law after all. Great thank you, how do I know it is all there and can I upload it to a similar company easily. Unfortunately that bit is not so easy.
I would like to see a situation where when I hand my data over to a company they sign a list of my terms and conditions rather than the endless, unread end user licence agreements (EULAs) I click away to when I sign up to a new free service.
Tim Berniers-Lee inventor of the World Wide Web has recognised this and has developed an open source specification called Solid that enables people to take back control of their data and privacy. It is only accessible to app developers at the moment but he has started a company called Inrupt to help organisations work with personal data in a way that benefits both parties with ultimate ownership of the data residing with the individual.
Broadly speaking the idea is to create a massive decentralised database where people store their data in a standardised format wherever they want. In my Facebook example I would upload a picture to my timeline but it would be stored where I tell them to store it and I would give them a key to access it. If I stopped trusting them I would change the locks and give the keys to another platform. The NHS, BBC, Natwest Bank and the Flanders government are early adopters of this specification. It remains to be seen whether it will catch on.
How can you make them give your data back?
The fact that you want to buy a sofa, TV or a chocolate bar is a valuable piece of information to the people who sell those things not because of the value of your sale but because of the future sales these companies will make due to a deeper understanding of their customers. It is possible that you could share that information and have companies fight over your sale in the form of discounts or benefits in kind on condition that you can have your data back if you want to at any point. Companies like Invisibly started by Jim McKelvey (Co-founder of Square) are experimenting with this at the moment.
The likes of Google, You Tube and Facebook have shown how valuable our data is to them by the sheer quality and scale of the ‘free’ products they offer us to harvest that information. The internet is now bubbling with decentralised apps ready to leverage better ways of sharing our data by building trust between individuals and organisations on a more level playing field.
Conclusion
The same data used to predict the likelihood of a person getting cancer can be used by health professionals to provide better proactive care or by an unscrupulous health insurance companies to suspend health cover before they become liable to pay for it.
To opt out of sharing health data, loyalty or bank cards because there may be a bad actor out there is to ignore the main issue which is we need more robust data privacy protections if we want to live in a modern world and take advantage of all that involves.
It will be hard but the juice of organisations striving to be trusted by their customers is worth the squeeze of setting up an infrastructure that enables customers to take away their data from negligent, corrupt or greedy organisations. However without an active body of individuals and government officials striving to guide companies that infrastructure will never materialise.
References
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did (forbes.com)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo6EjsSo_5A – Tim Berniers Lee about Inrupt – turning the web right side up.
Discerning Learning 