PRIVACY: IS IT GOING TO BECOME A LUXURY IN THE FUTURE?
We live in the digital age, where our actions are governed by the devices existing around us. In relation to the vapor trails that we create when we move around in the physical world, we create data trails while browsing the internet. This is your personal exhaust called data exhaust (Anon., 2015). In today’s digital age, user data has become a valuable asset to the businesses, which they use for analyzing and targeting the ads based on the outcomes (Altshuler, 2019). We are offered services (generally social) in exchange for our private information. Our information turns into currency and privacy into commodity. Given such an environment, we need to protect ourselves, because privacy isn’t about something to hide, it’s about something to protect (Anon., 2016) .There are three aspects to right to privacy: First, users should choose what data they want to share. Second, the right to be left alone. Third, it should be impossible for the government and organizations to precisely construct our personality based on the data collected (Altshuler, 2019).
If we look at the past, it was the time of real innovation when it wasn't data-driven. Henry Ford once said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!’” (Anon., n.d.). This was an era when innovation was driven by vision rather than data. 91 per cent of people actually agree without understanding legal terms and services (Probolsky, 2018) . Even today, Apple remains at the top in privacy concerns. Following to Cambridge Analytica Scam, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who believes innovation, great features and breakthrough ideas go hand-in-hand with user privacy, before the global body of policy regulators, laid down four principles that should guide legislation (Anon., n.d.):
First of all, the right to minimize personal data. Companies should strive to remove or prevent the collection of information from customer data first. Second is the right to knowledge - to know what and why data is being obtained. Third, access rights, which states that companies should make it easy for you to access, correct and delete your personal information (Anon., n.d.).
Inventions have provided people with the mindset of fast food and turned them into fast freaks. This has attracted and lured them to compromise their privacy for the benefit of free services. It all starts when start-up’s hire developers to develop pieces of software and the information privacy thing comes much later. As the software gets more sophisticated, the information becomes much more indexable (Guardian, 2016). There is data which is public and private. Often, organizations mix up the two which raises the concerns over privacy. In the past 25 years of technological innovation, WiFi, smartphones and Online banking have been rated amongst the top three (Anon., 2019). When all these revolutionaries come together along with the privacy concerns, it comes out of no question to have stringent policy regulations to protect over financial details. Confidential data falls under the umbrella of private data which an individual would not like to share. According to the United States’ laws controlling commerce and internet security, personal information shared with doctors, banks and merchants should be held confidential. If this information is leaked, a person may no longer go to the doctor and if this happens, it’s a loss to society as the infection or disease may spread and a loss to the business as well. Sometimes the flaws or vulnerability aren’t destructive. It’s something that corporates can address and improve upon. Ethical hackers are hired by organizations to help them address and improve the flaws in the systems. “Privacy by design” says that privacy should be taken into account throughout the process of engineering, regardless of how small or large the product or service is.(Anon., n.d.).
In order to gain privacy, there are various business models which require you to pay for experiencing an ad-free version. This has led to the outburst in the key thinkers of the private domain. Companies are now building models that require you to pay for enjoying uninterrupted streaming services/ ad-free version of apps and websites. This raises the concern of privacy as affordability only for the riches. Apps such as Spotify, YouTube have built their business models in such a way that no matter in which part of the globe you are in, they will track you and present you with the ads catered to the businesses in that area. All the businesses around us have become so much dependent on the data that it is really inevitable the businesses would take any decisions without data. Moreover, it has become unimaginable to stay offline even when you are actually offline. You pay for buying an Alexa and still it would listen and record snippets of your conversation. What are the customers getting even after paying for the product? Former Manager at Amazon Web Services, Robert Fedrick, told BBC Panorama, that while he is discussing private matters, he switches off his Alexa speakers (Parsons, 2020). The customers consent to it while buying the product without reading those long terms and conditions. Another challenge to privacy is the existence of Phishing websites. Phishing is an attempt to steal your personal information, usually by sending an e-mail (Anon., n.d.). As a result of credentials stolen with a phishing attack, up to 90% of all data violations occur (Palmer, 2017). Such phishing websites exist because of the data leaks which share personal information of the user and their email ids. It a vicious circle i.e. you share email and other details online and then phishing websites owners target you to obtain more data about you and this may eventually lead to loss of financial elements as well. Additionally, with the inventions of IoT devices, privacy is exploited even further. It is estimated that the world will have 64 billion IoT devices by 2025. A study conducted by Icontrol State of the Smart Home found that 44% of Americans “very concerned” about the information that would be stolen by their smart home devices (Intelligence, 2020). IoT devices are vulnerable to hacking. For example, in Samsung's smart home platform, a team of researchers at Microsoft and the University of Michigan has found a plethora of holes and the methods were far from complex (Intelligence, 2020). In practice, a connected device may be used by the manufacturers or hackers to almost invade a human. This was accomplished by German researchers by intercepting encrypted data from a smart meter to determine which TV shows someone watched at that moment (Intelligence, 2020).
With the constant grind to stay at top of the game and provide the customers with what they want, some players in the technology industry have exploited privacy in every possible way. Humans are the risk of serious attacks which may not be limited to digital attacks. With every website you visit and accept cookies, to the devices you own today, all share the data to the cloud. This data is then used by organisations for their own profit. It’s time we start to recognize the threat to human privacy. Maybe we should pause and take a step back at the things from Steve Jobs viewpoint, he always had a different view of privacy. At a conference, when he was asked what privacy means, he explained: “Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly. I’m an optimist; I believe people are smart, and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.” . This led Apple to excel in providing privacy to users. No wonder why Apple Homepod is almost five times the price of Amazon’s Alexa and Google Speaker. HomePod sends it to Apple to search and meet a request when it detects a message. Nevertheless, HomePod requests are anonymous, bound only to random, revolving ID, rather than link to a user's account request, such as Google and Amazon (Waddell, 2018). The privacy in Apple devices is the highest, which is evident from the incident from 2016 when Tim Cook and the whole team of Apple had to stand against the FBI. FBI wanted to unlock Syed Farook’s iPhone, they had asked Apple to create a new version of the operating system using which FBI should be able to crack the passcode — a security feature that means that in less than ten attempts data cannot be accessed without entering the right code manually. Apple denied such a request. Cook explained “But now the US government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create . . . a backdoor to the iPhone.” (KAHNEY, 2019). Ultimately after long sessions and debates, the FBI had back down and drop the case. This comes of no surprise why Apple devices are expensive compared to available cheaper options. But looking at the prices of Apple devices, privacy can be viewed as a commodity which is affordable only by the riches.
A recent news article read “Toronto police admit using secretive facial recognition technology Clearview AI”.Clearview AI can trigger search results on the basis of an image, including the name of a person and other details such as his telephone number, address or occupation (News, 2020). The real point of concern here is that earlier this year, investigation reports of New York Times present that more than three billion photos have been extracted from websites such as Facebook and Instagram and used by the software to build a database that was used in the United States, Canada and elsewhere by more than 600 law enforcement agencies. It raised long-term issues against Toronto police as to such as how any data collected are stored in the Ontario court and whether they are ever used as proofs (News, 2020).A possible solution to privacy in context of AI is In provided by (Stahl & Wright, 2018). They have proposed a framework and developed an approach to research and innovation, which focuses on the importance of privacy when dealing with AI and big data, in what they call "smart information systems."
With all the tools available at-hand like paid subscription methods to enjoy an ad-free version of the applications, paid services of apps that protect your data using encryption, and the need to buy Apple devices so that you get the required privacy in the digital world, this has become viewpoint of the masses that privacy is only affordable by the one who can afford it. Along with the GDPR implementation taking care of the privacy norms in the EU region, society as a whole need to take a stand against the exploitation of privacy in this digital world. There’s one more approach to ensure the privacy of users, namely “Big Privacy”.(Machanavajjhala & Reiter, 2012) have outlined in a paper the approaches to protect public data records using methods such as suppression (i.e. deleting sensitive values), aggregation (using methods such as k-anonymity, I-diversity etc.), data swapping (i.e., switching values of sensitive data records to prevent users from matching), add random noise, or simply replace entire original data values with synthetically generated values from simulated distributions at a very high risk of disclosure. Managing Big Data has become a vital task given that the amount of data being generated every minute and the numerous application and advancements it provides.
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