Thoughts on personal data in the digital age

“Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”

Such was the statement of the British mathematician Clive Humby back in 2006. It was only a few years later that the world would begin to witness the extent of this claim and its implications as the computer security specialist Edward Snowden disclosed the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency which was monitoring people and gathering information related to their personal lives, not only in the US but around the world [1]. Another incident shed the light on a different sort of intrusion when a father complained to Target, the big box store company, claiming they were encouraging his 16-year-old daughter to get pregnant. She was targeted in a promotion campaign for mothers and received coupons for baby diapers, except it turned out the daughter was already pregnant. The company had leveraged data mining techniques to analyze its customers’ behaviors in order to predict pregnancy allowing them to retain young parents as long-term customers [2]. One would think such events would be an eye-opener for the public and make us contemplate our relationship with technology. This, unfortunately, is far from being the case.

Fast forward to 2021, we have 65% of the population online, generating up to 79 zettabytes of data per minute [3]. Most importantly, however, is that we now have the technology permitting us to constantly crunch this data into meaningful insights. This gave birth to numerous services, such as the security feature from Google which analyzes your activity and detects potential account takeover. Or simply the recommendation systems that are catering to our taste on daily basis. These are all legitimate applications that have objectively made our lives easier. But what happens when they are turned into tools exploiting our data for profit? Can we still speak of freedom when the algorithms providing you with the best match for your search are also utilizing your browsing activity to analyze your tendencies and create targeted advertisements designed to push you to purchase a product or even behave in a certain way?

Social media companies for example, have gained the reputation of conducting social experiments on their users. They have invested millions of dollars into psychological tests to determine which tweaks should be made in order to make their product more enticing. In fact, studies have shown that social media apps were designed to activate the same neural circuitry as that related to addictions like gambling or drugs [4]. Moreover, almost all big tech companies have incorporated the selling of data into their business model. Data trafficking is no longer an illegal practice confined to the dark web but is now common conduct to which we voluntarily contribute. Not only are we identifiable online, and the privacy of our lives is easily compromised, we are scrutinized, our behaviors analyzed, and even manipulated. This brings up the question of how much of free will we truly detain in the face of these advancements and the fine line between using technology as a tool and falling victim to it. We live in a time where access to information has never been easier, yet we find ourselves spending as much as 142 minutes every day on social media [5]. A valuable time we ought to spend forming and strengthening human connections, or learning a new skill, for example, is now wasted being hooked on a virtual world seeking external validation. Even those utilizing the internet more for its informational side usually find themselves trapped in what is called the echo chamber effect; A user’s personal data is regularly collected across different applications (eg: browsing history, localization information,…) and combined to form a detailed profile of their personality. Whether it’s a simple Google search or looking up a topic of interest on social media, more often than not, the results displayed are customized and reflect the person’s beliefs and opinions. So, users receive results which echo their thought patterns [6]. The main purpose of this system was to retain the user’s attention for as long as possible, but it also provided powerful insights into people’s way of thinking and soon enough the same concept ended up being used in influencing millions of people during the elections in the US in 2016, under what is known as the Cambridge Analytica incident. When considering this event along with the censorship initiatives applied across the internet, one cannot help but question the legitimacy of such actions which can be regarded as an attack against the individual’s basic right of access to information.

The abundance of data in the digital era coupled with the advancements in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining has contributed to the creation of many modern solutions. Nevertheless, once personal data is added to the equation, things tend to take a gloomier path. Luckily, this issue did not go unnoticed as initiatives like the General Data Protection Regulation (RGPD) addressed the privacy problem and established laws enabling people with more control over their information. The question around the enforcement of these laws, however, remains open as we shift our focus from the original problem to that of the regulations applicability. A test it failed to withstand against the surge of the pandemic as an example when phone companies in Germany, Belgium and Poland directly proceeded to share the localization of their clients with the government discarding the fact that the text explicitly refers to the control of epidemics as a derogatory case [7].

Having laws supporting the protection of personal information is clearly necessary but far from being sufficient. It is, in fact, our responsibility as well, to take the necessary precautions to protect ourselves on the internet, limit our oversharing of private details and seek to create a healthy relationship with technology. Moreover, it is our duty to educate ourselves and the future generations about the potential negative impact this can have, not only on individuals but on society as a whole. In this digital era where even devices are connected to the internet and equipped with a form of intelligence, basic knowledge in computer science should no longer be a privilege of a selected few but rather an essential skill.

As a future computer scientist, I find we have a responsibility as well when it comes to the kind of work we decide to engage in. We are usually inclined to believe that technology is the ultimate solution to most of humanity’s problems if not all. We feel like we are in a race to take part in the next big breakthrough yet we seldom stop to consider the implications of our actions and we fail to see that technology is rarely the only component to be considered in the process.