Data: How private is your life?
As we get more and more accustomed to the growing numbers of databases and systems that hold information about us, information about our families, our jobs, our illnesses and our misdemeanour’s. As we input more and more of our personal data into business records, government databases and social networking sites, should we be asking the question of how this information can be used against us?
A Birds Eye View
If you were to walk out of your house right now, walk around the area that you live in for ten or fifteen minutes and observe the world around you, the chances are that you will be able to spot at least one camera. The chances are even higher that the number of cameras that you see is much more than just the one and the thing that is all to easy to forget is that these cameras are recording us.
We very easily grow blind to the fact that these ‘security’ cameras have snippets of our lives from every time that you walk past them.
Many people won’t worry about this. Many people have no need to worry about this. They have nothing to hide and therefore don’t give these cameras a second thought, but whether you have something to hide or not these cameras are just the tip of an iceberg of information that is collected about a vast majority of the population every single day.
So How Much Do They Know About You?
Well let’s start with what you are doing right now. Chances are you’re sitting on you computer at home reading this. Where were you before this? What other sites had you visited and what site will you visit after?
If were to call up your internet service provider right now and ask them to send you all the details that were held on their database about you, I think you’d be surprised at how much detail they have about your surfing antics. The minimum you’d expect to see from your isp would be 12months of records.
Then ask yourself how many times you’ve bought things online or signed up to newsletters. How many times have given your address or telephone number? How many times have you given someone else’s, maybe to have a present delivered to them? It begins to add up.
Now there’s a database trail of not only what you do online, but links to the physical world around you and don’t forget that these lists are freely sold to the highest bidder in many cases.
And Social Life?
Then there’s social networking sites.
The complete transformation in the way that we communicate with each other over the last few years has changed the way that many of us see the data that we are willing give to complete strangers.
We broadcast into an open internet things that we wouldn’t tell our next door neighbour and openly invite strangers to look through our thoughts, our pictures, to meet our friends and family, to learn our habits and preferences, but maybe we need to stand back and think about these actions once in a while.
So what does this mean for you you?
Well, for the majority of people, the information that is bouncing around the networks of the world, around government buildings and business servers will never cause any problems, but for others this could be a different story.
If the criminal records of the entire population of Britain were to be held on databases(which I’m sure nearly 100 percent are) then that would give over 60 million records. That’s a lot of information to reliably store and if you cast your mind back to any of the news reports about government records being lost(on a train, in a pub, etc, etc) or database systems being corrupted or unreliable, then things start to get a little bit scarier.
Let’s assume that 1 or 2 percent of criminal records become corrupted and the information held in them is not wholly true, which happens a lot (due to systems matching up dates of birth with names and coming up with the wrong person, for example). This would suggest that over one million people in Britain alone could, at some time in their lives and probably when they least expect it, be wrongly identified as a criminal. Hopefully the crime they get mistakenly identified as committing will be small, but there are cases of people being arrested for very serious crimes of which they had nothing to do with. These records though are notoriously difficult to rectify.
Anyway, I know I’m waffling a bit but I had just watched this documentary from channel four that got me thinking, so I thought I’d come share those thoughts with you(and I’m sure they’ll go into one of my databases somewhere in the unknown!).
The documentary was called Erasing David and the link’s at the bottom of the page.
I would really recommend watching it.
Phil.
Erasing David – Channel 4. Watch it.
