The importance of privacy

You do not have to convince me of the importance of privacy. I got an anonymous bonus card to the supermarket, I don’t have any pictures of my kids on Facebook and read (roughly) the general conditions before I ‘accept the term of agreement’. Yet, I’m in over 1,000 data sets, which together probably know everything about me. I am aware of my own privacy, but is everyone?

No difference between private and public information

Allesandro Acquisti is aware of his own privacy. He is well-known advocate of privacy, best known for his speeches on the theme: “Why privacy is an illusion.” In the TED video below he shows for which he stands. “Why privacy matters” is a provocative speech, which starts with the privacy of Adam and Eve. In the video he elaborate on the dark side of Big Data. Everything is known to everyone, the line between what is private and what is public isnt’t there anymore.

Facial Recognition

Acquisti has recently carried out a project to support his thesis. He has taken some random anonymous faces, which he found on the Internet or persons he took pictures of on the street. He analyzed thee pictures by computers using facial recognition and link this information to available public information. The result: one of three photos could be linked to a actual person, and to (all of) his personal data. If you know that the software is not yet fully developed and Big Data still in its childyears, we haven’t seen everything yet.

Think about it when Google Glass launches; you will know, in theory, a lot about everyone you encounter.

Is this a bad thing? Most people will say, “No, because I have nothing to hide.”. But what if people use all available information deliberately for negative purposes? For instance to manipulate your data? Acquisti calls for a change of the rules to adapt to the future. I couldn’t agree more.