Smile you are being watched

Smile you are being watched

Data privacy can be defined as “the aspect of information technology that deals with the ability an organization or individual has to determine what data in a computer system can be shared with third parties”.

Every time we open a bank account, hire a new service or open a profile online we are handing over personal information that can be processed to give personal details about ourselves.

Information on a single person is not really valuable but imagine what corporations can do when they own millions of pieces of data and they put them all together. The advertising industry for example has valued consumers data on over a billion dollars and uses data brokers to access the desired information. This “third party” can use the information to get to know consumers and approach them in a more assertive way. They can also use data to trace potential consumers and increase their business. This makes me question if we are actually executing our free will right. What percentage of our daily decisions is based on the “third party” influence?

Governments can also use data to monitor the population and track potential safety issues through the Internet and mobile phones.  

The healthcare industry is an other player on the data privacy game. The pharmaceutical companies can use data to determinate patterns that could guide their next research and development projects and allocate resources in a more efficient way.  The problem is that the usage of this information can also harm the consumers. If we assume that the genome sequence will be available for everyone in a near future and we imagine that the genetic information lands on the insurance companies hands, we could say that insurance rates will depend on what your health history will be. This could disrupt the health system, as we know it today.

One of the biggest problems with data privacy is that there is not currently a global regulation for it. Every country has different da policies that can be classified from limited to hard. Canada for example the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) apply to both consumers and employees while in China there is currently not a comprehensive data protection law.

If you want to consult the regulation in a particular country click here.