Technology

Privacy is dead

Is a world where data privacy is respected one ask too many?

17 April 2019

What’s the harm in a meme? This is the question posed in a Wired article about the 10-year challenge. In this internet fad, participants share a photo of themselves from a decade ago and one from today, marvelling at the difference. Good fun, but, as the article points out, also a decent dataset that could be used in less appropriate ways. For example, what if an insurer decided to use the data and check if someone is ageing prematurely?

The point is that people have freely given up personal data without even realising it. It’s abundantly clear that most of us don’t grasp the definition of private data. Yet we can get very emotional about it. When Cambridge Analytica harvested a lot of user data from Facebook, we all turned on the social media giant as if it were breached.

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