“Privacy is Dead” in the Cloud and Mobile Computing Age

March 15, 2016 – On the Ides of March when Julius Caesar succumbed to an attack by fellow Roman citizens I declare more than Caesar is dead, so is our privacy. Why do I say this?

On the weekend while walking across a street at a light I was struck by a car turning right. I’m fine but shaken. I came home a bit bruised and more frightened than anything else. When I got home I told my wife and she messaged my daughter. Within minutes my story was on my daughter’s Facebook page and everyone with “friend” access knew what happened to me. In less than an hour our phone started ringing as our friends who read our daughter’s Facebook postings started calling asking “is there something you are not telling us?”

Yes, privacy is dead in the Internet and social media age. But the lack of privacy brought about by data sharing is even more insidious. How many of you bank online? How many of you use an electronic calendar? How many of you text message or post comments and thoughts on social media sites? All of this data is permanent. In the cloud it remains forever. And there are people and businesses packaging up those bits of data and marketing them to make money.

In Alec Ross‘ book “The Industries of the Future” he describes how even before we talk to our children about the “birds and the bees,” today in the Age of the Internet and mobile technology, we need to have a conversation about “data privacy.”

Ross knows what he’s talking about. He was senior advisor on technology innovation to Hillary Clinton when she served as the American Secretary of State from 2009 to 2012. Before that Ross was convenor of the technology and media policy for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. He has seen how online data is today a threat to privacy and a disruptive consequence of the digitization of everything.

He calls data the raw material of the Information Revolution, as important as land in the Agricultural Revolution and iron and coal in the Industrial Revolution. Think about how we stored data before the Internet. Information got put on paper…books, newspapers, magazines, company annual reports, medical charts, letters, etc. I remember reading a science fiction novel about a future when whole planets would serve as libraries filled with the collective knowledge of civilizations. Obviously that writer never saw the Internet coming.

Ross observes that until 2000 “only 25% of data was stored in digital form.” By 2007 “that percentage had skyrocketed to 94%. And it has continued to rise since.” In political campaigning mining personal data to target specific constituencies proved to be the key to victory for Obama’s primary and presidential campaigns. Targeted messaging worked because the Obama team knew more personal information about individual voters than had ever been gleaned before.

Ross quotes Michael Slaby, former Chief Technology Officer, Obama for America 2008, about the emergence of big data. Slaby states, “Big data’s really just the application of the commodification of computing power combined with the wider availability of cloud computing. We can now chew through enough data fast enough in a way that people can afford…and storage got cheap, so we can store lots of data…and then we can actually process it fast enough to make use of it.”

Inside big data is an intimate knowledge of every data bit associated with your Internet activity. Companies like Alphabet (formerly Google), and Amazon, governments and cyber criminals all can parse your contribution to big data.

So how much of your privacy is threatened? Anything in your public online persona is out there for data analytics to parse and exploit. Only your reliance on the security and privacy assurances of Cloud-application providers protects you. And sometimes when you read the fine print of the licenses for those cloud applications you download to your latest smartphone, you find wording that describes how your data can be marketed to third parties.

In a talk to the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Margo Seltzer, Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University, stated, “Privacy as we knew it in the past is no longer feasible.” Ross points out that the Internet of Things will only further establish the fact that “privacy is dead.”

With the Cloud we have let data out of Pandora’s Box and the only question remaining is how do we get some of it back in the Box to ensure that at a future time our entire personal genome doesn’t become public property or owned by a third party. This is a subject explored by Michael Crichton’s 2006 science fiction novel, Next. Crichton describes a potential future where an individual treated for leukemia ends up losing ownership of his own DNA to a biotechnology startup.

Going back to what a parent needs to tell a child before giving him or her a cloud-connected device, what should that conversation sound like?

Parent: You are about to enter a new chapter in your life.

Child: What do you mean?

Parent: I’m about to give you a [smartphone, tablet, laptop, gaming device, etc.] You are about to become a digital citizen of the world.

Child: Wow. All I thought was I was getting a [GameBoy, an iPhone, iPad, whatever]. What’s the big deal?

Parent: To become a digital citizen means sharing information about yourself in the Cloud. There are some things about yourself you shouldn’t share.

Child: But I want to be on Facebook with my friends and use Google, and play games?

Parent: I know but I just want you to understand what you should and shouldn’t share. Never give out personal information that could come back to hurt you. No personal details or photographs that could be exploited by someone you don’t know. That means never friend or connect to someone if you don’t know who they are or where they are. And when you are about to install a free app make sure you look at the license agreement to see if you have given the developer the right to sell your digital persona.

Child: All I wanted to do was play games and connect to my friends. Boy are you ever paranoid.

Parent: No…not paranoid….just knowledgeable about how privacy can be compromised and exploited. Now I’ve prepared a contract for you to sign agreeing to what we have talked about. Sign it and I’ll hand you the keys to the Cloud. Oh, and about that other thing….you know, sex, we can have that conversation another day.