#bigdata security privacy surveillance a2k

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Privacy and Security in the context of Big Data

Dr. Sherif El-Kassas gave an interesting talk about privacy and security in the digital age and we want to highlight some interesting quotes and pieces of information.

He started by asking:

“Have we accepted surveillance as a business model?”

While this might be a rather disputed statement, it shows how technology is mediating every bit of online conversation and how this gives rise to many opportunities for surveillance. Granted technology also enables access to knowledge and information as well as brings countless benefits. But both the positive as well as the negative aspects are built into the very fabric of technology: These are related to the way the network is set up which means that your message has to go through many notes in the network - each retaining a copy of your message and meta data on your message. In short your activities are being tracked and monitored.

Dr. Sherif El-Kassas asked many questions that made us think. Most importantly, he asked:

How free are the ‘free services’ on the Internet and why should we care?

Google, Facebook and others make money from advertising, so what appears as free actually means that you are paying with your data. Is this a win-win situation?

In conversation with his students, Dr El-Kassas said that they thought that privacy was dead: Security and privacy are trumped by convenience and functionality.

He cautioned that this was due to the fact that we don’t understand the implications and extent of information that can be deduced from this data.

One example he provided concerned a psychiatrist and her patients: Facebook ended up recommending that one psychiatrist’s patients should become friends on Facebook. This suggestion - based on location data - was not intended to reveal confidential information that is covered by doctor-patient confidentiality, but in the end it did.

How reliable, secure and safe is the connected world?

The second half of his presentation focused on the our dependability on the connected world. Dr El-Kassas brought several examples of security breaches and hacks, indicating that this digital infrastructure isn’t as secure as we would think.

This picture below shows a map of data breaches, each blob represents a topic and the size of the breach.

Finally, the question about Internet surveillance was raised. After the revelations of Eduard Snowden, we know that pretty much everything that happens on the Internet is monitored. It was pointed out that this pervasive monitoring is legally covered and even if one might get rid of the infrastructure in one country, there are similar infrastructures in place in others. 

This leads us to a situation in which privacy, security and democracy need to be debated. Richard Stallman asks,

How much surveillance can democracy stand? 

The question about the way forward offers several potential pathways:

Technology: protection for privacy must be technical

Economics: privacy must become part of business models

Politics: privacy needs to be discussed and re-evaluated as a principle in public discourses

It remains to be seen what the future holds for privacy and security in the age of Big Data.