Social Media and the Death of Privacy
- Engineering science
This was published six years ago
The internet and the decease of privacy
Technology watchers say the data stored describing the behavior, incomes and activities of billions of people is a "lethal cocktail" merely waiting to be used by future tyrants and dictators.
Past Iain Gillespie
There will e'er exist positives and negatives to the wondrous, globe-enveloping world wide web, but some downsides are meliorate subconscious than others.
The potential disadvantages become beyond existence bombarded with targeted ads after viewing a product online, and have piffling to exercise with the one thousand thousand or so Australians who presumably cringed in fear when the infidelity website Ashley Madison was hacked.
Members of the group Raging Grannies stage a demonstration regarding Facebook's privacy policies outside its headquarters in California. According to a study past British security firm Friedland, 78 per cent of burglars utilise social media such every bit Facebook and Twitter to get condition updates and to target properties. Credit:Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
For a showtime, think about services that could switch from using your private details for marketing and instead utilize them to decide how much you will be charged.
Insurance is one example. Privacy experts warn that detailed information on personal lifestyles – gathered from sites such as Google, Facebook and many other sources – volition soon be used to decide how much individuals pay for their health insurance.
Katina Michael, associate professor of data systems and technology at Wollongong Academy, says global companies with intimate details on the lives of hundreds of millions of people are already establishing their own insurance arms.
"Your health insurance will go upwardly because data being stored about you on the cloud will show you lot're not doing enough exercise and are buying lots of fatty foods," she says. "Your time to come health provider may well exist a subsidiary of Google, Samsung or Microsoft."
Michael says that along with its massive surveillance chapters, Google has invested in 23andMe, a visitor that tells people how their futurity wellness may exist influenced by their genetics. Hundreds of thousands of people have already given their Deoxyribonucleic acid to this company, she says.
"Yous might realise your personal details are being harvested only yous don't know how the companies storing your data are enmeshed in the background, the alliances and partnerships they take. You lot don't know these things."
Personal security is some other downside. For instance, GPS location data gathered from mobile phones, cloud storage of dwelling house addresses, and online chats about holiday plans are in the everyday burglar's toolkit.
According to a written report by British security business firm Friedland, 78 per cent of burglars use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to get status updates and to target properties. Google Street View also allows them to programme break-ins from the comfort of their own homes.
Social media marketer Sam Mutimer, of Thinktank Social in Melbourne, is refreshingly candid nearly the manner many thousands of companies such as hers get together intimate details on people and track them beyond the net like skilled hunters stalking prey.
Her hunting grounds are plentiful. According to web statistics compiled by a Sydney social media agency, Facebook has 1.44 billion users globally, including fourteen one thousand thousand in Australia. You Tube has 13.viii million in Commonwealth of australia, WordPress 5.vii million, Instagram 5 one thousand thousand, Tumblr four.4 one thousand thousand, LinkedIn 3.6 million, Blogspot 2.7 million and Twitter ii.7 million.
"Online privacy is pretty much expressionless," Mutimer says. "There'south so much information we can pull from social media these days considering people are very song and say what they think. If y'all sign upward to a site similar Facebook or Instagram, you're giving them all your information, and they volition sell that data to outsiders.
"If I wanted to focus on new or expectant mums, I can go to the dorsum end of a site like Facebook, enter a keyword like 'mothercare', and target them. Nosotros tin send them news feeds that look like a friend posted them, maybe proverb they could win a pram."
That's simply for starters. Mutimer says she tin track individuals across the internet in existent time, using cookies to see what websites they are visiting. She has the power to identify an advertizement on a website at exactly the same fourth dimension as her target is visiting information technology.
Such ubiquitous online marketing creates another downside – annoyance. We are increasingly finding our online experiences interrupted past ads that obscure what nosotros're trying to read, or by banner ads over a video we are watching.
Phil Jones, chairman of one of Australia'south tiptop marketing consultancies, The Bridge, believes bombarding targeted people with automatic online ads has reached the stage where information technology tin exist counterproductive.
"You still need an intuitive agreement of when information technology's appropriate to place a marketing message," he says. "It's 1 affair knowing you tin can reach the right target, it'south another deciding when to do so. For instance, in real-life selling, you wouldn't interrupt a wedding reception, would you? You lot nonetheless need to use subjective judgment."
Jones points out that sophisticated monitoring of telly audience profiles and impress readership has been around for decades. The information gathered has ever been complex but it is much richer with modern online tracking. "It's most like forty years ago we had X-rays and now we take MRI scans," he says.
That brings us to what could terminate up being the biggest downside of all: mass control. Michael describes stored data describing the beliefs, incomes and activities of billions of people every bit a "lethal cocktail" only waiting to be used by future tyrants and dictators.
Another Australian expert on online privacy agrees. Professor Roger Clarke researched the issue equally a university bookish for 30 years and at present runs a Canberra consultancy chosen Xamax. He believes mass command is already starting to happen.
"Public servants are subjected to far more constraints, people in universities are watched much more, employers in the private sector lookout what employees do and say in their spare time. That kind of constriction in society is already happening. Commonwealth of australia'due south privacy laws are completely ineffective and they've go fifty-fifty weaker with the changes passed in March concluding yr. They're designed to arrive like shooting fish in a barrel for marketers, not to protect privacy."
Professor Clarke says it would be almost impossible for people to avert online surveillance without completing an IT course, and even and so it would be difficult.
"The best mode is to kick our parliamentarians into passing laws that actually have an effect," he says. "That'southward being done in various countries around the world, especially in Europe. It'due south non happening in Australia."
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