This is a very good article by Michael Corn Chief Information Security Officer at the University of California, San Diego. He runs through the most pertinent issues regarding privacy and the urgent need to address the issues of how personal data is being used without transparency, true governance or how without giving us an iota of control.
The rise of surveillance capitalism — the buying and selling of our identities and our data — may herald the death knell of privacy. Social media and targeted online advertising are designed to allure us; in the process, we are losing our rights to anonymity and accelerating the erosion of our civil rights. Proposed individual “solutions” — such as configuring our social media privacy settings or using the anonymous Tor web browser — are at best half-measures. A personal example best illustrates why.
“Like 21.5 million Americans, I too had my personal information stolen by Chinese hackers in the 2015 breach of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). To compensate me for their failure to protect my records (and that of every member of my family and relatives) I was provided with credit monitoring services from Experian, one of the big three credit bureaus. The primary result of this service is that I’m now flooded with offers to sign up for new credit cards carefully selected by Experian based on my credit score. My reward for being an OPM breach victim is to receive targeted spam that uses my personal information to benefit Experian and its commercial partners.”
We’re losing the war against surveillance capitalism because we let Big Tech frame the debate by Michael Corn on Salon.com
“Imagine an Uber-like service that used publicly traded information associating your phone number to your race, and used that pairing to provide slightly poorer service to African Americans. Or a real estate site that used such data to surreptitiously tailor the house listings presented to you based on your assumed religious or ethnic background. What if ICE quietly bought ads on sites offering immigration assistance to migrants, only to raid and arrest everyone who clicked “I’d like to hire an attorney.”
If regulation is not enough, how are we to protect our privacy? Thus far, regulations do not clearly address when it’s permissible to collect personal information and what can be done with it, and the fines are rarely punitive enough to change behavior. If we think broadly of privacy as a resource to be valued, perhaps we can find some insight on how to protect it.