In this data driven age, are we now giving away too much information?
- Paul McRae
- Dec 20, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 22, 2023
Attitudes have changed, and so have the risks
Dec 20th 2023
Have you ever wondered why adverts suddenly appear on your X, Instagram or Facebook feed for products that you have just been viewing on the internet or via other social media? For example, you may have been searching for Summer holiday deals in Turkey one minute and then a few hours later an advertisement for 7 nights in Bodrum pops up halfway down your social timeline. Coincidence? Definitely not.
Data, all sorts of your data, is being shared by big tech companies to other organisations who then target you, using your information for personalised advertisements.
Most of us have known for a while that we’ve been giving away lots of our personal information while we enjoy the internet, our smartphone apps and social media, choosing to sacrifice our privacy for online productivity, work and entertainment - but are we now giving away too much of our personal data?
Risk versus reward
There was a time when the majority of us erred on the side of caution with our personal information, preferring to keep things private. Not to generalise, but If we’re putting it down to generational attitudes, most people born before a certain year would most likely be unwilling to share personal information or images of themselves with people that they do not know very well, never mind people they have never met.
Think about your parents, or grandparents, and what their view would have been if they were asked to part with personal information. There would undoubtedly be more of an unwillingness to do so by them. This is changing now of course, as government and councils push people, including older generations, to carry out business online with transactions such as car tax and bin collection permit renewals. But as the older generation has aged, and up until recently mainly continued to shy away from online interactions and information sharing, the younger generation have arrived, brought up on Smartphones and Facebook, with a much more adventurous and carefree attitude, willing to dive in, head 1st, to consumer technology, the internet, social media and all the things that the digital age has to offer, freely parting with every piece of personal data there is to share and fuelling the construction and population of the largest databases of user information the world has ever seen.
But are we now at the point where we’re sharing too much? And doing so too willingly? And what does this mean for us? Let’s start with the basics and one example of an action that doesn’t involve much thought - internet browsing.
When you browse websites and move around the internet, cross-site trackers (small files known as cookies planted within your browser) follow you, collecting data on which sites you’ve visited and what information you have clicked on within each website. This can be helpful in terms of offering you a personalised experience but 3rd parties can also use these trackers to collect data without you being aware - and without your permission.
One of the most prominent companies for doing this is Google.
Google own some of the most widely used cross site trackers on the internet and one of the most widely used is “doubleclick.net” which online advertising companies can utilise to display adverts on their websites. With this, companies can see what areas and pages of their sites are being browsed and provide you with more targeted or “personalised” adverts. This is where that holiday to Bodrum advert on your timeline comes in.
This explains the targeted advertising, but what data, specifically, is being tracked? The main ones are your name, your email address, your phone number, your IP address, the devices that you are using, the times you’re using your device, how often you’re browsing, what you’re browsing, your social media handles, and more. And those are just the main ones! Without realising it, you will most likely at some point have entered your personal information when setting up your new smartphone or social media account for the 1st time or when you registered for a particular service. And, at the time, you will have been warned that the service you are registering for would be gathering this information with the company having the right to share it with other companies - but these warnings would have been buried deep within the multiple page and thousand-word User Agreements that you chose to accept - but did not read.
The Privacy Paradox
In a recent Government study about public attitudes to data and AI, 1 key finding was telling:-
“People are comfortable with personal data being used for a variety of purposes, particularly when the societal benefit is clear. Most people (81%) are comfortable providing personal data about themselves to the NHS to develop new healthcare treatments, and to government to deliver public services (62%)”
In other words, people will give up their personal information freely IF they are convinced it will provide them significant benefits whether or not they know or trust the company or person asking or for that information.
When people state significant privacy concerns but do not protect their privacy this is known as the ‘privacy paradox’ and this behaviour may be partly due to the complexity and uncertainty around the implications of giving up this information - such as the benefit or the repercussions.
Personal but public
But what are the companies doing with all that data?
One of the main things companies do with your data is use it to build up customer profiling so that they have a better understanding of who you are and what you’re interested in. And companies want to build up this customer profile and make it as detailed as possible for one, main purpose: They want to make their interactions with you as relevant and as personal as possible. This engagement is designed to blur the emotional lines between products and humans - in other words, make products so personal that they feel a part of you, an extension of you - and therefore make them feel essential to you. And this may explain the reason that some of us find it almost impossible to put down, or be without, our technology.
In the movie Steve Jobs, there is a scene where the Macintosh computer is being set up to be unveiled as part of a 1984 demonstration at Apple's shareholders meeting at the Flint Center in Cupertino. The late Jobs repeatedly insists to his team that the Mac must speak when it is unveiled with the word “Hello” to be spoken at the point of the reveal. The technician tasked with making this happen is struggling to make it work and eventually Jobs is asked why it is so important that the Mac speaks, to which he replies:-
“Hollywood - They made computers scary things. See how this computer reminds you of a friendly face, with the disk slot as a goofy grin. It’s warm and it’s playful and it needs to say Hello. It needs to say Hello because it can”.
Technology was then, and still is, becoming a part of us, an extension of us and not just something that we use. Jobs felt the Macintosh had to speak to us metaphorically and literally. And today, this has never been truer for the smart devices that we now use, answering our questions and obeying our commands while they listen to us, ready to act on the next command.
Every cloud
As we move to more and more services being hosted in the “cloud”, there are other considerations that we must be aware of. Companies migrating their data to cloud-based solutions have a lot to consider and need to ensure that they thoroughly review their implementations carefully with their service providers, ensuring that any transition has the strictest security measures in place to protect their data. Many of the vendors may sit outside the UK and EU, some in countries deemed inadequate or unsafe by UK standards for data transfers.
Data Privacy should always be at the forefront of any business leaders thoughts - failure to prioritise it is a huge compliance, financial and reputational risk.
GDPR should be one of the saving graces for us all. The regulation, which came in to force in May 2018 to replace the Data Protection Directive from 1995, aims “to enhance individuals' control and rights over their personal information and to simplify the regulations for international business” however it alone may not be enough to enforce and protect all of the concerns around our date usage and information sharing.
Consider this
So what are the repercussions of us giving away too much of our information? For example, while it can have great entertainment value to use one of the many “Face Swap” apps available for download, doing so could be detrimental. To use the app, you have to take a picture of your face and upload it to the app so that the software can then plant your face on another body. But what happens to that image? Does it stay on the device locally or has it been uploaded to the servers where the software is hosted, potentially anywhere in the world. And what could that image potentially be used for?
Identity theft is continually on the rise, year on year, as are online scams, and this is one significant and very real risk. Scammers were responsible for nearly 1.4m cases of fraud in the UK during the first 6 months of 2023 – the equivalent of one every 12 seconds – with romance scams and ID theft among the fastest growing categories. As reported by the Guardian, overall, criminals stole £580m in the first six months of the year, according to the banking trade association UK Finance, suggesting households are set to lose more than £1bn to fraudsters during the remaining months of 2023. ID theft saw the greatest rise and increased more than 50% to £33m for the six months.
Conclusion
Comments