5 Articles that will help you learn more about data privacy and security
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Data Points.
With all the Facebook scandal discussion in full force this week, it only makes sense for us to bring you some articles about data privacy and security.
I remember visiting Silicon Valley and talking with few of the executives of major companies like eBay couple years ago, and one of them told me: “If you haven’t choose a field, choose data security, it is going to be the biggest thing in the next 10 years.”
Indeed it has become one of the biggest pain for companies, not only to prevent their data from being maliciously stolen, but also using their data in a responsible way that is adherent to moral and legal standards.
This week, we are going to examine few of the biggest topics of discussions in the topic of data security and privacy, ranging from EU’s new data protection law, to block chain — the “future” of transparent data technology.
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Enjoy!
The Articles and Episode
Transcript
Introduction
Zach: So, this week’s edition is about data privacy and data security. We chose this topic these week because it’s extremely relevant right now.
Especially with the news regarding Facebook and Zuckerberg’s comments, data privacy and security have been everywhere.
So, we’re going to touch on some of the new privacy laws that are coming into effect, the consequences you may have if you ignore data security, and a couple of other topics related to that.
Article 1: Mark Zuckerberg’s Reckoning: ‘This Is a Major Trust Issue by New York Times
Zach: Our first article of the week comes to us from the New York Times, and it’s titled, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Reckoning: ‘This Is a Major Trust Issue.’”
If you are not aware of what this article’s talking about, essentially Facebook in the past couple of weeks has been under fire for irresponsibly controlling its users’ data.
Because of its lack of due diligence, a firm called Cambridge Analytica was able to access more Facebook user data than otherwise should have been able to.
This really brings up the fact how important it is for corporations to take control and responsibility for their users’ data.
And within this article, we get an interview with Zuckerberg where he really apologizes for everything that’s gone wrong, and promises to do better in the future.
This event has caused a lot of outrage, and at the end of the day, I’m not really sure that it’ll push users away. There is the whole #quitFacebook trending, but I’ve kind of been under the conclusion that my data out on the internet is out there for corporations to use and an event like this has been happening in the past and will continue to happen in the future.
What’s your take on how people are going to respond to this?
Bill: When you are talking about how people are going to respond to these kind of issues, you need to divide into segments and populations.
For young people, like us, for millennials, for people who are tech-savvy, it is reasonable. We kind of expect this, that’s why during our episode “Millennials,” we said that millennials don’t trust anyone, just because we know these shady things are happening to us.
But for people who are less technically competent, less technically adept, it might come as surprise to them that Facebook, are being incredibly irresponsible when they’re using their data.
There need to be some sort of governmental oversight to prevent this from happening.
And at the same time, there need to be some public awareness or some restructuring of the control of data across our society to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
There need to be some sort of transparent, democratic process for us to understand how our data are being used to prevent these kind of things from happening again.
Because right now, they just use our data however they want to, without our permission to do it, and that could be a big issue further down the road as our data become more and more available.
Zach: Right, it is a scary thought to think that maybe millennials are conditioned in the world we’ve grown up in to not be as concerned about their individual data security and the world that might lead to. So it’s a good thing to keep in mind and our data security is up to ourselves to a certain point.
Article 2: Analytics are no longer for humans, here’s how we can fix that by Analytics for Humans
Our second article of the day comes to us from our very own Bill Su. The article is titled, “Analytics are no longer for humans.
Here’s how we can fix that.” I’m gonna go ahead and let Bill take this one away, ’cause he knows it better than I do.
Bill: Yes, so I kind of primed this article a little bit from our previous discussion. It’s actually interesting that a lot of the things I said in article actually became true and became more and more topical in recent years.
The article came from my observation of right now that majority of our data are controlled by major corporations like Facebook, Amazon, and Google without major oversight from the government, without a way for us to democratically monitor how these data are being used.
I call this “data feudalism” because I came from political background and I tend to get political on things every time I see it, but it is true because if you think about it.
Right now, we do not have a choice of not going on Facebook because our friends are on there and it’s a method of communication, it’s a main method of communication for many people right now.
And at the same time, Facebook are very, very untransparent about how your data are being used.
Yes, there are initiatives that they took for you to see your chat history and things as such, but when it comes to advertising, when it comes to the nudges, political driven ads.
But there’s really no way for you to realize that your the news and message you receive are being biased towards your political or social opinion.
This creates a lot of problem like fake news, which create problems like what we see right now is election meddling, and it’s gonna be continuously being a problem unless we take action as individual citizens and the government take action to urge these companies to be more transparent and actually ask permission from us to use the data.
They can still use it, but they need to be responsible and there need to be a way to hold them responsible for what they are doing. And that’s essentially what this article is talking about.
Zach: So what you’re talking about is flipping the current data control paradigm on its head and having corporations ask for our permission rather than us checking the box and giving it away immediately … putting the onus on them rather than on us.
Bill Su: Yes, and also at the same time, in the current age, data is power. Knowledge of people’s life and preferences is incredibly powerful influencing their opinions. And power being gathered in such concentrated area by these companies means that it will corrupt them, because power always corrupt.
It might leads to something that we don’t want to lead to, like some dystopian society where these organization control the entire society.
But obviously those are …
Zach Diamond: Let’s not get dramatic, but I do see your point, okay, cool.
Article 3: Europe’s new data privacy law will change the web, and more by Wired
Let’s go ahead and move on to our third article.
Our third article comes to us from Wired, and it’s about Europe’s new privacy law and how it will change the Web and more.
This law will come into effect on May 25th and it’s called “G.D.P.R.,” or the “General Data Protection Regulation.”
Sounds a little bureaucratic, but in essence what this means is that companies are going to have the onus of data protection or regulation put on themselves rather than on the user.
What this is gonna look like in practical terms is that when you go on a website and you start surfing, they’re going to have to ask very explicitly for your permission to track your actions and collect your data.
Now all this data is anonymized currently, but they’re still collecting it and they wanna give users the ability to stop that collection and stop that tracking.
This is going to have really widespread influence, especially on advertising, as advertising technology companies really rely on that data to target their ads.
This is really important legislation, and I’m curious how it’s going to affect data collection and web surfing moving forward.
I’m curious how that’s gonna happen in U.S., but also generally more globally. So Bill, what’s your take on how this legislation is going to have an effect on consumers in Europe as well as whether or not we’ll see some more global progress on this front.
Bill: So there will definitely be global progress in this ground, but the speed and progression will be different across different part of the world.
I do a lot of business in China and I know that such law will not be in place in China for another, I dare to predict, five to ten years because people’s awareness of their privacy and their security is simply not at the level of European countries yet.
For the U.S., people are starting to getting more advocacy in, so they’ll probably be similar things being passed that will be somewhere along the line of the European law that we see right now.
But we also need to be aware that the legislative branch in the U.S. government function very differently than that of Europe so this law may be delayed or otherwise, depending on how important it is to the interest parties in the States.
Finally, talking about how they influence data collection for small or medium-sized businesses, and also big businesses: I think it actually doesn’t, because the facts of data analysis is that you can never capture the population data, all the data you will get are going to be samples, and you should advertise and make business decisions based on data sample instead of trying to get all data possible.
So in terms of analytics I will say that it makes very little different when informing business decisions for a company, since you will never have the full data anyway so it doesn’t really impact much.
In regards to targeted advertising it will impact target advertising a lot because you simply cannot target people who opt out of target advertising.
But at the same time, it encourage targeted advertising to be more interactive, to actually ask user, “What you want to be advertised?” and to create this connection between the end users and the advertising companies so they can both benefit each other.
Because right now, advertising are benefiting more the companies than the users, and that is a unhealthy trend going forward, and I think data protection law by the government will only be a positive force enforcing this conversation continuing to happen, which will be good in the long run.
Zach: Great, so maybe hopefully we’ll see a little bit of a rebalance of power regarding data control and data privacy between corporations and users.
Article (or Graphic?) 4: Blockchain — The new technology of trust by Goldman Sachs
Zach: Alright. Article number four, or more graphic, really, comes to us from Goldman Sachs and it is all about blockchain, the new technology of trust.
This is a fairly complicated topic, so it’ll be really great for you to read this on your own, but a quick summary is essentially that blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin and is essentially a decentralized system of keeping track of logistics.
It takes place on many, many, many different systems; there’s a ledger kept, and this ledger is changed with every transaction. However, because it’s held on so many different systems, it’s extremely difficult to hack because you would have to hack every system at once; in fact, it’s nearly impossible.
This has a lot of different implications: it could be used for electronic payments, for logistics, essentially any system in which there needs to be a lot of transparency.
So Bill, I want to ask you: what are the chances that an industry as large as electronic payments, for example credit card companies, adopt technology like blockchain?
The security advantages are obvious, but at what point will it become a profitable change for them in this, so that they actually wanna adjust all of their infrastructure?
Bill: So they will never adjust all of their infrastructure to satisfy blockchain.
Blockchain, in my opinion, also you can read the opinion of experts in the field, is never a revolutionary technology as they call, like A.I., or invention of Internet or anything like such.
Blockchain is more of a small step innovation on data security and how transaction occurs within organization.
Even within a financial institution, it’s difficult to entirely use blockchain to manage all transactions.
I can use blockchain to manage, for example, a transaction of a single currency, or of my transaction with a group of friends so we can all hold each other accountable and we’ll all know that no one else are stealing our money.
But when it comes to something that’s highly sensitive, so for example every single transaction I conduct with my store, with my doctor, or anything as such, it becomes a challenge.
This is because for blockchain, while it’s advantage being that the ledgers on multiple computers and virtually impossible to hack, sometimes you don’t want the ledger to be on multiple computers, you don’t want someone else to know what you’ve done with your money. And that requires anonymization or very complicated process for it to work.
I actually investigated a lot of technology for blockchain for one of the consulting projects I was doing, and looked into IBM blockchain, Alibaba blockchain, few of the biggest blockchain companies in the world right now that offering blockchain technology.
They are in reality using 30%-40% blockchain to do a very niche work, like logistics, instead of using this as a very broad implication like SQL database or anything as such.
The very interesting thing that Alibaba is trying to do is blockchain, it’s trying to make it make public donations more transparent. So everyone in a non-profit will know where the money is going, and is know it’s going for a good cause.
But only to these users blockchain are useful. For small/medium-sized businesses, it’s a hype that you probably should not jump onto and you can jump onto if you want a lot of investor money because investors are insane in invest in blockchain technologies at the moment.
There’s actually a very interesting episode on Last Week Tonight by John Oliver that talks about this, so check it out if you’re interested in those kind of stuff.
Zach: Alright, so blockchain is great in certain circumstances, but due to the nature of what makes it great it would be really hard to adopt on a wide scale. Cool.
Article 5: The Top Five Data Breach Vulnerabilities
Zach: Alright, we’re gonna go ahead and move onto our last article of the week. Article number five comes to us from Forbes, and it is, “The Top Five Data Breach Vulnerabilities.”
We’ve all heard about the big data breaches that have been happening in the last few years, with Equifax, and to a point Facebook and Yahoo, all kinds of companies.
This article runs down a list of some of the most vulnerable points within a business. Talks about your employees, unsecure mobile devices, as well as cloud storage, third-party service providers, and malicious attacks.
You can go ahead and read more in-depth about what he recommends, but what I’m curious about Bill, is one thing he mentions in this article is that a lot of business owners ignore these risks, they don’t see them applicable to their businesses.
What point do you really think this becomes a serious issue for them? And at what point does cost-benefit analysis for them to adopt measures to protect against these kinds of breaches make sense?
Bill Su: I think, in terms of data security, it’s the same issue similar to data analytics, everyone’s like, “Yes, important, but I don’t need it right now.”
But the fact is that you do need it right now; if you’re keeping secure data from your customers, about their information, about their email, especially Social Security Numbers kept on your database, you need to make sure that’s secure and that is ethical to do so when conducting a business.
You shouldn’t even do a cost-benefit analysis on this because this is just what you should do as a responsible business owner towards your customers.
But at the same time, going off the article a little bit, talking a little bit about that and what you can do, it’s actually not very difficult.
In terms of data security, it’s more of a design problem than of a technology problem. You don’t need to buy or install very expensive data protection technologies, instead what you need to do is to figure out how can you design your workplace, design organization, so data are secure.
One thing that’s really helpful will be everyone using corporate emails, so when that person leaves the company that email will be kept by organization and all the confidential emails and contacts will be kept within the organization.
And at the same time, maybe also implement some good password management protocols, like using something like a password manager like LastPass to manage your password, instead of having your employees’ birthday or your employees’ loved one’s name as their password, as they might end up doing.
A lot of these things are very easy to do, and sometimes might sound foolish and stupid, but they are very helpful when helping you to protect your customers’ privacy.
Zach Diamond: Great, so when it comes to data privacy, you can’t start too soon, right? You can only lose the confidence of all of your customers which, when it comes to businesses, is fairly important.
That’s gonna go ahead and wrap up, the last day of the article, our last article of the edition. Thanks again for listening, we really appreciate it. If you have any feedback, questions or comments, go ahead and leave it in the section below, and make sure to read up on it and better next week. Thanks again, and we will talk to you in seven days. Bye!
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