Does Privacy Exist?
Part 1 of 2
Part 2 is now live!
Digital privacy is a all over the news currently, most prominently around the Cambridge Analytica scandal which has led to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s facing interrogation from the US Congress. The line between what data we, as individuals, classify as private and what digital services classify as private is becoming ever more blurred; this has caused public outcry and there are many reasons for it!
Data collection, both digital and more conventional, is nothing new so what triggered this latest uproar?
If you’ve not recently seen the news you’ll have missed the scandal that a data collection company, Cambridge Analytica, exploited users trust on Facebook by harvesting data from them via a Facebook quiz — this allowed them to collect data on over 80 million Facebook users. The scandal, occurring on the world’s largest social platform, has ignited debates about the influence of the data on the Brexit vote and the US election. All of this poses the question; is your data private online?What is my online privacy?
If you’re concerned your data has been collected please visit this support page from Facebook.
What is digital privacy?
Privacy is a very ambiguous word which has different meanings to each of us, taking this into a digital context blurs that understanding further. Depending on your age, cultural background, personal experiences and many other factors the information that you deem as valuable and private will vary — generally younger people are more carefree about sharing personal, sometimes intimate, information online whilst older generations tend to be more sceptical about doing so. This information could be something simple as your age or sexuality, through to more intangible complex pieces of information such as your political stances or personal traits.
Pretty much every digital service collects data on its users, it’s how that data is used which separates those services. In the context of social media, specifically Facebook, they collect data directly (data you input) and indirectly (through web tracking, etc.) which they then utilise for multiple tailored services from improving the platform to providing more targeted advertising. Companies such as Apple collect a lot of data on its users as well however enforce very strict codes of practice on the use of the data and more specifically the access to that data. Companies are now realising more and more that they have both a moral, even social, responsibility with that data as well as their legal obligations to protect it.
If you were to sit down, grab a pen and paper, and then draw out a mind map of all the websites that you’ve ever used. Then for each one write out the information you provided purely for using their service, you’ll soon notice that the extent of data you’ve provided is vast. Even though this data is something you’ve explicitly decided to provide to the website, they also collect an extensive repertoire of data on top of this.
The extent of this data is where the causes for concern arise, even more so taking into account data sharing between services. What this means is that private companies know more about us than ever before and the blurred lines of legality on how that information can be used means it is simply left for corporates to decide.
In real terms we all have a right to privacy, and in effect our data. However laws have failed to keep up with the rapidly complex and adaptive technology meaning these rights are harder to enforce or even identify. Lawmakers are now trying to familiarize themselves with the complex entanglement of data out there to bring in additional privacy controls that ensure commercial viability is not drastically impacted but public rights are stringently protected.
An example of this is the incoming “General Data Protection Regulation” within the European Union helping strengthen the public’s right to privacy and enforcing business to provide transparency on the data they store and how it used.
You can view some of the data Google store on you by visiting https://adssettings.google.com and https://www.google.com/maps/timeline.
