Dangers of a data-driven world: two questions that might help protect you

Venturing into a distant corner of a foreign country was once a daunting experience. Today, TripAdvisor will guide us to obscure but wonderful eateries thanks to the collective contributions of its users. Google will translate images of parking notices and restaurant menus on the fly. Tinder will connect us with fellow travellers for a cocktail at the hotel bar. With a wealth of information and digital tools, we can navigate that Korean fishing town.

Online platforms persist and amplify information for easy retrieval and that data typically enriches or simplifies our lives. These same platforms also offer:

· The ending of your career through the re-surfacing of off-the-cuff social media tweets or posts from your formative years.

· The mental health effects, including suicide, of the circulating of intimate photographs that were intended only for the eyes of a lover

· The burglary of your home or theft of your vehicle when you post vacation snaps for your followers from a foreign destination

· A stalker using your geolocation data to find you and follow you home or to your place of work

Who would have thought that pictures added to MySpace two decades ago could be used today by DeepFake technology to generate a pornographic video of you or depict you carrying out a criminal act?

Or the Instagram post with hasthtag #28today means your full date of birth is public knowledge and by determining the names of your parents from Facebook, a malicious actor now has enough information to order a copy of your birth certificate to open a bank account?

Or that the voice from your conference presentation on YouTube can be analysed to diagnose a range of medical illnesses from your vocal biomarkers?

As principles, it is entirely safe to assume:

· Persistence: Any data shared is no longer in your control and will be available to others indefinitely. Even deleted content can be easily retrieved from caching archives.

· Joining the dots: slivers of data, which by themselves are innocuous, can be combined across platforms to a provide a very detailed picture of who you are

· Future exploitation: Your data of today will be subject to the analytics of the future. The capabilities of these analytics are probably beyond our comprehension.

On this last point, imagine how unfathomable the idea of seeing inside a human body would have been before the x-ray machine or witnessing an aircraft take off might be to those that had only seen birds command the skies. Large language models like Chat GPT remind us that technology does not stand still.

The decisions we make with our data are based on our understanding of today’s world. However, as analytics capabilities for unstructured data (video, audio, image) evolve, unthinkable insight will be obtainable. Personality, health and behavioural profiles derived from your choice of language and the audio signal of your voice are already here to stay. What is next may well be beyond our imagination.

Now, the surest way to avoid food poisoning is to stop eating and, of course, it’s equally absurd to suggest you stay away from the internet and its data platforms, but it is sensible to take steps — behavioural and technological — to mitigate these risks.

Two questions that are worth asking

Each time we sign up for an online service or post something, we need to ask: Q1: What are we receiving in return for committing this piece of information to the shared internet?

If you are getting back something meaningful and valuable — something hopefully more than a boost to your self-esteem through a ‘like’ — and that something far outweighs the cost (= risk) of sharing this piece of information, great!

But just before we click “post”… Q2. What is the minimum amount of information we need to handover to achieve the same outcome? Do we really need to use our real name or date of birth?

We mentioned that the decisions we make with our data are based on our understanding of today’s world but there is a question on how literate we really are in this space. For example, if you don’t know what being ‘pwned’ or ‘doxxed’ means then perhaps you are not fully up to speed.

So, how do you protect yourself?

Those two questions should help but as wars pivot to being fought entirely by keystroke and our societies becomes almost completely data driven, it is unlikely that over the course of a lifetime an online citizen will remain unscathed.

And that’s okay. In the physical world, you wouldn’t expect anyone to have had an active and fulfilling life without a few bruises and grazes. The same holds in the online world.

On average the reward tends to outweigh the costs but, for your own data health, embrace both education and technology to arm and protect yourself.

Most importantly, treat your data as your most prized commodity and, at least, don’t hand it over without receiving something in return.