Reflecting Big Data Privacy
When it comes to digital privacy or big data privacy, I’ve been pretty skeptical since I was a kid. This was, of course, after learning the hard way about what happens when you download viruses in files like Stairway To Heaven.exe. It’s absurd, but I didn’t know what was what back then in the early 00’s. I figured .exe was a song file you executed. Anyways, lessons learned.
We’ve been learning about Big Data Privacy in relation to computer ethics for the past couple weeks. You know: mass surveillance, Internet of Things, etc. Since I already have a good grasp of privacy, most the material presented hasn’t been surprising. In fact, some of it seems familiar (like Glenn Greenwald’s Why privacy matters). I think the biggest surprise for me was Andy Yen’s speech: this is only because I use ProtonMail and was glad that it got some good rep.
If anything, the material further cemented my skepticism regarding privacy. While I try to leave as small a digital footprint as I can, there is almost always a way to trace it back to me with the use of metadata from the users and people I interact with. This was pointed out by Marie Wallace in her speech for TED: The ethics of collecting data. In her talk, she said, “. . . in this interconnected world, data leaks between people. So the data someone else shares can generate an insight about you” (Wallace, 2014). Rather than being surprising, it’s reaffirms that extreme measures are needed in order to achieve true privacy.
I liked Greenwald’s impassioned speech; he rails against people who say “only bad people have something to hide.” Greenwald (2014) lampoons their hypocrisy, saying, “Now, there’s all kinds of things to say about that mentality, the first of which is that the people who say that, who say that privacy isn’t really important, they don’t actually believe it, and the way you know that they don’t actually believe it is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn’t matter, with their actions, they take all kinds of steps to safeguard their privacy.” Privacy matters; privacy is desired. That I wholeheartedly agree with.
Andy Yen also championed that privacy was important in his speech: Think you email’s private? Think again. In it, he used email to not only show how we lost privacy, but to also show how people and companies can implement a “privacy by design” mentality. Yen (2014) says “privacy doesn’t have to be difficult, it doesn’t have to be disruptive.” And that’s true, but I’m also a skeptic.
It goes back to the fact that big data companies make their money from selling marketing data. I’m reluctant to believe they’ll stop mining sensitive data overnight or that they will have any inclination of respecting privacy. As Yen (2014) said, “If we want to have privacy online, what we have to do is we’ve got to go out and get it ourselves.” The biggest question to this is: who’s going to do it?
References:
Greenwald, G. (2014, October). Why privacy matters [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
Wallace, M. (2014, April). The ethics of collecting data [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/marie_wallace_the_ethics_of_collecting_data
Yen, A. (2014, October). Think your email’s private? Think again [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/andy_yen_think_your_email_s_private_think_again
