Data Privacy : How Little We Know

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Data privacy has always been a concern and now with a growing data hungry corporate where everyone wants user-specific data, the privacy of individuals is in grave danger. Here I describe in two sections cases covered by popular media. It wouldn’t be far fetched to assume that there are plenty more that haven’t struck the media as news-worthy.

  • The Facebook Moods Experiment

I guess everyone came across this article once, or must have heard about this in the news because guess who it’s about ? Facebook !
        Yes, our good old social network that has now become second nature to surfing over the internet dented the beliefs of its users (well, certainly some of us) by conducting an experiment that concerned manipulating the emotions of 700,000 Facebook users. The experiment was done to study the effects that the news feed had on people’s emotions and how they spread through networks. The study was published in the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Facebook issued an apology later but it’s still crazy to think that Facebook possesses this kind of unchecked power. What’s more surprising is that this experiment had little legal consequences and most media posts claimed that it was “almost certainly legal” of Facebook to have done something like that. For any organization to possess that kind of ability is simply indicative of our lack of understanding of data privacy and the policies that should govern the collection and usage of data. Here is a link to the study[4].

  • Holistic View

A  recent New York Times article claims that the lack of understanding of data privacy is rampant across organizations. The process of cleaning data is called de-identification and provides anonymity to users who have with or without consent become a part of a corporate data experiment. The problem is that not only has big data granted us the tools to analyze data to predict weather, it has also granted us the power to de-anonymize data and obtain details about individual users based on patterns. How do celebrities tip taxi drivers was possible to obtain from de-sensitized taxi driving records. A recent study (under review) about the usage of credit cards in shopping malls indicates that it is possible to identify individuals based on their credit card metadata. Netflix is to pay a penalty nine million dollars in a privacy lawsuit directly concerning consumers who were past users of their services. 
The above cases indicate that there is a need to conduct data experiments more responsibly. I was not aware of these things before I stumbled upon them. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is the lack of awareness regarding these issues. 

  • References

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