DATA IS THE NEW OIL
Can a supermarket find out that a teen is pregnant even before her father gets to know it? It turns out that a father in Minneapolis discovered that his daughter was pregnant not from her but the local Target store. He made the discovery when Target began sending his daughter; coupons for baby clothes and cribs. Angry and upset, the father of the teen girl stormed into the Target store and started lambasting the store manager for sending baby coupons to his 15-year-old daughter. However, a few days later, the father called the store and apologised, after figuring out that his daughter was pregnant. Target, by analysing customer data, such as credit card information and guest card details, was able to comprehend patterns. For instance, Target noticed that women in the baby registry were “buying larger quantities of unscented lotion at the beginning of their second trimester besides vitamin supplements such as calcium, magnesium and zinc. As the statistician of the Target trudged through the data, he could identify about 25 products that when analysed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. When their statistician applied the predictive model against the millions of women in Target’s customer databases, they could identify thousands and thousands of pregnant women before any other companies had made the connection. Also, the statistician at Target could estimate the customers due date within a small window to send coupons timed to particular stages of their customers’ pregnancy. Can customers trust supermarkets and other commercial establishments with the large volumes of data they are collecting storing and analysing? Given the breach of Target’s database in 2013, the data of 110 million customers got jeopardised. What warranties do customers have that assures them that troves of their data available in custody with various establishments they are dealing won’t get stolen?
We also entrust incredible quantities of data to private companies; Once the genie is out of the urn, it cannot be put back inside again. Absence of law, irrational terms of service means the data brokers have surveillance capabilities which are significantly better than the government.
In this age of Google and Facebook, firms that catalogue people’s activities for income, share, stock and disseminate everyday details of people’s lives. This creates challenges for the people as it becomes difficult to keep anything private, as it is difficult to predict where the information will end up.
The data we share on social media sites can show up in startling ways. For instance, two students from the University of Texas, Ms Bobbi Duncan, a 22-year-old lesbian student and Mr Taylor McCormick, a gay, didn’t want their parents to know about their sexual orientation. But Facebook exposed them. Both of them separately joined a student group on campus, called the Queer Chorus, to meet other gay and lesbian students at their school. When they got enlisted in the organisation, the president of the Queer Chorus welcomed them by adding them to the group’s Facebook discussion page, which he could do without their permission. The president didn’t know the software would automatically tell their Facebook friends that they were now members of the chorus. When he did so, Facebook sent an automatic system notification to Bobbi’s and Taylor’s entire list of friends including Bobbi’s father-notifying him she had joined the Queer Chorus. Two days after receiving the notification, Bobbi’s father wrote a reply on his Facebook page: “To all you queers. Go back to your holes and wait for GOD. Hell awaits you perverts. Good luck singing there.” Facebook had outed a closeted lesbian and a gay and had caused Bobbi’s parents to disown her. In response to the unredeemable harm she suffered, Bobbi blamed. Facebook
George Orwell’s 1984 portended a surveillance state governed by a handful of the elite who incriminate independent thinkers with “thought crimes”. But what he did not visualise was not the big brother government doing something to us, but we did to ourselves through sites like Facebook and Google etc. We have consented ourselves to become monetised and monitored by agencies by willingly surrendering our data to internet companies.
Take Leigh Van Bryan for instance, a 26-year-old Brit, who was fascinated to be venturing on his first visit to the USA. Before his departure, he sent a tweet to his friend, asking her if she was free for a quick gossip before their journey to destroy America. Van Bryan’s use of the word ’destroy’ in British slang meant ”getting trashed and having fun partying”. The Department of Homeland Security that had been monitoring social media for threats against America now had Bryan in its radar. Immediately on his arrival Bryan and his travel companion 24-year-old Emily were handcuffed and put in a cell with alleged Mexican drug dealers for twelve hours. After an uncomfortable night in separate cells, they threw Van Bryan and Emily on a plane back to the U.K. They denied the couple entry to the United States and deported them back to Britain. In the end, the only things destroyed were their visas and vacation.
This may be reminiscent of the plotline from Franz Kafka’s famous novel ”The Trial”, in which they apprehend a man without being informed why and only later learns that a bizarre court has a secret dossier on him, which he cannot access.
When we are the subscribers of internet and social media companies, the challenge we face is that they can use the data provided in one context in unexpected ways in another with significant fallouts.
Heretofore, quite a lot of the data accumulated made no sense, as our collection abilities exceeded our ability to untangle the data and make meaning of it. But today this scenario has changed.
Today when we download free apps, we wittingly or unwittingly allow the app companies to collect data, aggregate them and sell them unencumbered by legislation to many companies at mind-boggling prices. Nobody ever questions who has access to our data and how it is being used against us.
Dataveillance is today rampant, and its uses, capabilities and powers are being unleashed in ways nobody would have ever visualised. We leave a trail of data throughout the day in the form of text messages, phone records, browser history and email that live on forever. The data left behind by us enables the companies to find prospective customers at greater accuracy than previously possible.
For example, Google Now once installed accesses our entire digital imprint including our web searches, in-box, hotel bookings contact lists, etc. and our physical location. With this massive data, it can simulate our pattern of life. What if any other company had access to our pattern of life? For instance, if the husband and wife were sleeping in the same room from the data, it would be easy to surmise that the husband and wife are living together. What if the mobile phone was for a night somewhere in the proximity of another woman’s mobile? What would that suggest to Google or others? When we study one’s data patterns over time, it would reveal almost everything about that person’s life as well as help the companies sell products based on his preferences.
Take the case of the highly popular “free dating site OkCupid. The site asks the users seeking dates with partners to fill out questionnaires on the site, and most presume, wrongly, that the data they provide such as whether they are smokers, consume alcohol, preference of sexual partners, group sex, own a firearm, or use illegal drugs etc remain only within the OkCupid system, and are utilized exclusively for locating a suitable match. what It does not reveal to them is that OkCupid is a large data extraction company which shares the data with advertising firms, data brokers and marketers. To unravel the extent of the data leakage Ashkan Soltani, a digital privacy specialist created a fake account on OkCupid. On deploying privacy apps such as Collusion, he discovered that replies given by OkCupid’s users were being shared with data brokers in real-time. As he filled in that he was a drug user in his OkCupid profile, he found his cookie file being shared with a data broker called Lotame. Such is the state of affairs in the world’s unregulated data broker industry. Even when you have “nothing to hide,” your continually tracked social network graph and location can come back to bite you and also affect your financial status.
Another challenge in the world of big data is the information we share and our intention to prevent them from leaking out to others. People get often deceived by those with whom we have shared our intimate details, mainly photographs. Sexting or sharing of sexually explicit SMS via mobile phones is a rising phenomenon. The photos shared in such a manner do not disappear, the data rubble often comes to bite the originators in startling ways.
Hackers are breaking into and stealing all the date we have reported about ourselves on the Internet and various social media sites. All such data gathered has powerful implications for our personal and professional lives and even for our safety and security. They sit as a ticking time bombs available for picking by criminals. Organised crime groups and terrorists are taking advantage of all the data with shocking implications for all. We are not in control of our data and our destiny. Having given all our data, we find ourselves at the mercy of data goliath’s who can do as they please with our data and information.
George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned a surveillance state controlled by a handful of the elite who incriminate independent thinkers with “thought crimes”. But what he did not visualise was not the big brother government doing something to us but what we do to ourselves through sites like Facebook and Google etc. We have allowed ourselves to become monetised and productised by voluntarily relinquishing our data to internet companies.
Governments are also going after the massive data warehouses we have created such as Google. In 2010 Chinese government went after Gmail accounts of the activists in the USA and other countries for criticising China’s human rights practises. It was further reported that hackers belonging to China’s People’s Liberation Army targeted the source code of Google’s Password Management System which gave them access to millions of Google’s subscribers worldwide.
A century ago,oil was the richest resource.. Now comparable qualms are being raised by the companies that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unbeatable. Their earnings are surging: they altogether racked up over $25bn in net dividend in the first quarter of 2017. Data may be the new oil, but misuse and inappropriate use of data in the material world can be prevented when we all realise that the spiritual is more real than the material.
Source from: epaper/deccanchronicle/chennai/dt:14.10.2019
Dr.K. Jayanth Murali is an IPS Officer belonging to 1991 batch. He is borne on Tamil Nadu cadre. He lives with his family in Chennai, India. He is currently serving the Government of Tamil Nadu as Additional Director General of Police, Law and Order.
