In the age of social media and online profiles, maintaining privacy is already a tricky problem. Companies collect more and more data of its customers through internet, and with the help of AI programs, analyzing our data gets faster and more sophisticated, making it a commodity for companies and a liability for us.
There are a numerous small examples of questionable data use, most of the time harmless. But what happens when governments or potential employers can gather what seems like innocent and useless information to uncover your most intimate secrets – like health issues even you didn’t know about yet? Furthermore, a lot of people are unaware of the value of their data, exposing them to cases of identity theft and data fraud. People use various technical products and most of the time people sign in without reading the terms and conditions stating how their private information will be used. It looks like without the meaningful data literacy, people will keep sharing their private information online, while being oblivious of the impact of their data being made available in this way.
Various scientists and professors already spoke out their concern of the loss of privacy, stating now is the time to insist on the ability to control our own data.
The rules and regulations for data protection tend to be very lax in a lot of countries. most companies do not invest enough in ensuring the protection of their users since there are no real consequences for the mishandling of private or personal information. A dilemma here is the regulation, collection storage and trading of data when companies and operations operate across multiple continents and jurisdictions.
concluding, many challenges remain in how best to use these massive datasets while ensuring data security and privacy. It is important that all parties – companies, individuals and governments – take responsibility to help and try solve this big problem, before the consequences can no longer be overseen.
What are your thoughts about this topic? What does privacy mean to you? How important do you find it to have control over your data? Do we need new laws or corporate policies? How can we ensure our data does not get used for nefarious purposes?
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Kwamboka, L.(2017). Privacy in The Era of Big.[online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/read-write-participate/privacy-in-the-era-of-big-data-45d5eb1cea75 [Accessed 3 Oct. 2018].
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Schmitt, C.(2018). Security and Privacy in the Era of Big Data.[online] Renci.org. Available at: https://www.renci.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/0313WhitePaper-iRODS.pdf [Accessed 3 Oct. 2018].
