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Data-driven society: utopia or dystopia?
Good stuff from (Lord) Jim Knight, who cites part of his speech in the House of Lords about data privacy:
The use of data to fuel our economy is critical. The technology and artificial intelligence it generates has a huge power to enhance us as humans and to do good. That is the utopia we must pursue. Doing nothing heralds a dystopian outcome, but the pace of change is too fast for us legislators, and too complex for most of us to fathom. We therefore need to devise a catch-all for automated or intelligent decisioning by future data systems. Ethical and moral clauses could and should, I argue, be forced into terms of use and privacy policies.
Jim’s a great guy, and went out of his way to help me in 2017. It’s great to have someone with his ethics and clout in a position of influence.
Source: Medium
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Commit to improving your security in 2018
We don’t live in a cosy world where everyone hugs fluffy bunnies who shoot rainbows out of their eyes. Hacks and data breaches affect everyone:
If you aren’t famous enough to be a target, you may still be a victim of a mass data breach. Whereas passwords are usually stored in hashed or encrypted form, answers to security questions are often stored — and therefore stolen — in plain text, as users entered them. This was the case in the 2015 breach of the extramarital encounters site Ashley Madison, which affected 32 million users, and in some of the Yahoo breaches, disclosed over the past year and a half, which affected all of its three billion accounts.Some of it isn't our fault, however. For example, you can bypass PayPal's two-factor authentication by opting to answer questions about your place of birth and mother's maiden name. This is not difficult information for hackers to obtain:
According to Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity expert, organizations continue to use security questions because they are easy to set up technically, and easy for users. “If you ask someone their favorite color, that’s not a drama,” Mr. Hunt said. “They’ll be able to give you a straight answer. If you say, ‘Hey, please download this authenticator app and point the camera at a QR code on the screen,’ you’re starting to lose people.” Some organizations have made a risk-based decision to retain this relatively weak security measure, often letting users opt for it over two-factor authentication, in the interest of getting people signed up.Remaining secure online is a constantly-moving target, and one that we would all do well to spend a bit more time thinking about. These principles by the EFF are a good starting point for conversations we should be having this year.
Source: The New York Times
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GDPR could break the big five's monopoly stranglehold on our data
Almost everyone has one or more account with the following companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Between them they know more about you than your family and the state apparatus of your country, combined.
However, 2018 could be the year that changes all that, all thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as this article explains.
There is legitimate fear that GDPR will threaten the data-profiling gravy train. It’s a direct assault on the surveillance economy, enforced by government regulators and an army of class-action lawyers. “It will require such a rethinking of the way Facebook and Google work, I don’t know what they will do,” says Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things, a book that’s critical of the platform economy. Companies could still serve ads, but they would not be able to use data to target someone’s specific preferences without their consent. “I saw a study that talked about the difference in value of an ad if platforms track information versus do not track,” says Reback. “If you just honor that, it would cut the value Google could charge for an ad by 80 percent.”If it was any other industry, these monolithic companies would already have been broken up. However, they may be another, technical, way of restricting their dominance: forcing them to be interoperable so that users can move their data between platforms.
Portability would break one of the most powerful dynamics cementing Big Tech dominance: the network effect. People want to use the social media site their friends use, forcing startups to swim against a huge tide. Competition is not a click away, as Google’s Larry Page once said; the costs of switching are too high. But if you could use a competing social media site with the confidence that you’ll reach all your friends, suddenly the Facebook lock gets jimmied open. This offers the opportunity for competition on the quality and usability of the service rather than the presence of friends.Source: The American Prospect