Category: datacappy

Every generation benefits from the advances and suffers from the mistakes made by its predecessors. Many of the problems we face today were created decades, if not centuries, ago. Climate change, social disparity, racism—messes we didn’t make but messes we live with and try to clean up nonetheless.

Our generation is no different, though the mess we’re leaving for our kids is entirely without precedent. The Digital Age, which dawned with the Internet and blossomed with the advent of the smart phone in 2010, is the biggest, riskiest social experiment in since humans figured out how to light a fire. And we—and our children—are the digital guinea pigs. This experiment is in its early stages, but results are already coming in. They’re not good.

In just two decades, we’ve shattered centuries-old understandings of privacy, shared information we hardly knew about ourselves with millions of strangers, and super-charged government surveillance. We made this mess and we have to start cleaning it up now.

It’s tempting to point to social media as the culprit. The influence Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the others have had on the human psyche has been profound, but it’s hardly the only problem created by our deepening reliance on digital devices. It may not even be the most worrisome.

Big tech companies are in a feverish battle to collect as much information on individuals—you, your kids—as possible. There are so many companies harvesting personal data that it makes the legislative attempts to control them, like the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” law, immediately obsolete.

The Digital Age has turned data into a commodity, bought and sold like soy beans and used in as many ways. Clothing manufacturers buy personal data to better understand trends and design shirts their customers are more likely to want. On the other end of the spectrum, governments use personal data to control their citizenry. In China, digital information is collected to create rating that determines a person’s allegiance to the Communist Party. It’s called the Sesame Score. The higher an individual’s score, the more likely he or she will get coveted government jobs, secure airplane tickets, or ride the train. China has become infamous for the Sesame Score, but other governments are making use of vast data hauls, too. In London, for example, there are nearly 700,000 closed-circuit surveillance cameras—one for every 13 people. It is all but impossible move through London without being watched, without your movements being recorded.

Social media—the platforms through which we share, share, and share some more—are as effective as they are because of the mountains of data Google, Amazon and other Big Tech companies gather about us. Facebook knows what you buy on Amazon and which hotels you search for on Google. They use that information to fine-tune their algorithms and tailor the ads you see on your feed. All that information about you gives them—Big Tech—power. Lots of it. And the more information an entity has, the more power it has. This goes for government, companies, and people.

At this point, you might ask, “So what? I’ve got nothing to hide.” Good! That’s true for most people. But it’s also not the point. The issue is what happens to the information we reveal about ourselves, how it’s fed into advanced algorithms, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence. How the companies and governments developing those technologies can use them—and the data fueling them—to manipulate people. We saw it happen in the 2016 election; no doubt it will happen in ways we haven’t begun to imagine. Think about the old Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs’s nightmares grow into an actual monster—that could be the mess we’re leaving for the next generation.

This is the great experiment of the Digital Age: Gather vast amounts of personal data—every time you click, open an app, download a song, buy a book, check the box scores, watch a movie, share a meme, place a phone call, you generate data that companies compile—and see what we can do with it. What’s going to happen? How are the digital guinea pigs going to fare?

If we don’t start facing the risks of this experiment going wrong and start to remedy the problem now, we’re going to leave the next generations a society entirely without privacy. It will be a world in which server farms know what you will want to buy long before you do—and then tell you to buy it. Healthcare providers and insurers will know exactly what you’ve been eating and adjust your policy accordingly. Governments will track your whereabouts.

The Digital Age is an era like no other. Everything about it is new. An experiment. We can get it right—by valuing privacy and regulating Big Tech—or we can do nothing and get it horribly, irrevocably wrong. And that’s not fair to the generations to come. It’s not OK for us to deny them their privacy. Digital guinea pigs deserve better.

If you’re reading this from anywhere but China, you probably don’t have a Sesame Score. But if you care at all about internet privacy and security, you should know what it is.

The Chinese government has created a social credit monitoring system to look over every member of its population. It’s called Zhima Credit and is popularly known as Sesame Credit or China’s Sesame Score. It was developed by Ant Financial, which is owned by Alibaba, the major online marketplace of China that competes with sites like eBay and Amazon.

Like a Loyalty Card

As the Washington Post put it, China’s Sesame Score operates like a loyalty card scheme that monitors and measures how trustworthy a person is, based on their credit history and online activities. It’s tracking to see if you are a good citizen or more of a trouble maker.

If you exhibit positive traits—always paying bills on time—while refraining from “untrustworthy” or even illegal actions, your score will be higher. If you spread lies on social media, try to avoid paying taxes or commit traffic violations, your score goes down.

Everyone gets an individualized score. People who have high scores are eligible for loans at more favorable rates than those with lower Sesame Scores. They also enjoy better access to car-sharing systems and are eligible for free healthcare checkups. Sound great. But there are downsides, too. The Washington Post cites reports of people with low credit scores being blacklisted and suddenly unable to purchase plane tickets.

Pros and Cons

Proponents of this system say it discourages bad citizenship and rewards good behavior. In China, 80 percent of citizens approve of the Sesame Score and other social credit efforts, according to the Post. Furthermore, 76% of Chinese people responding to a poll generally distrust Chinese society. They view a social credit system as useful for combating social ills ranging from con artists to polluters.

But from an outsider’s perspective, the Big Brother comparisons are obvious and the risks of abuse and repression glaring. China’s electronic surveillance directly affects tourists and foreigners who do business in the country. Forbes reports that “new cybersecurity laws give the Chinese government access to files, contracts, copyrights, business strategies and phone records with no permission asked” of foreign companies. China now requires businesses to gather and provide their internal information to a database to determine the “moral codes” of corporations that can lead in turn to punishment or reward.

Is this a harbinger of things to come in the United States? Powerful, largely anonymous corporations have already compiled profiles on internet users here. Those profiles can determine which ads you see and how long you wait on hold when calling customer service. Big Tech has been tracking all of us for years. In some ways, the Sesame Score isn’t all that foreign.

Reprinted with permission from privacyparent.com

In the effort to protect our online transactions, have we ceded too much power to too few? Is Sift, whose algorithms protect corporate behemoths from McDonald’s to Twitter, merely a free-market version of China’s intrusive Sesame Score? What is the cost of safety?

Online shopping may be pervasive, but it isn’t without risks. Credit card fraud, for example, is on the rise each year, eclipsing $30 billion annually, with the majority of the fraud impacting United States consumers. The COVID pandemic has only made things worse: April 2020 saw attempted fraudulent transactions increase by 35 percent.

One company is positioning itself as the answer: Sift, a technology security company founded in 2011. Sift’s stated goal is to eliminate fraud on the Internet by utilizing machine learning to combat illegal and suspicious activity. Sift claims that the average business partner sees an approximate 50 percent reduction in payment fraud.

One of Sift’s most prominent assertions is that good users shouldn’t have to be penalized for the work of criminals. In other words, everyday users shouldn’t be forced to authenticate themselves to an extreme degree. Sift claims it’s able to separate the good users from the bad users in virtually every circumstance due to their website activity. On paper, it’s a great thing, and indeed, it may help to keep the Internet a safer place.

However, there are some significant privacy concerns at play. If Sift is able to interpret user activity to determine if someone is a regular user or a hacker, how much data is Sift really tracking about Internet users? Where is that data being stored? What happens if that data gets released?

The questions don’t end there. Because Sift is so pervasive and works with so many large retailers, it’s privy to a lot of information. Sift’s machine learning makes ample use of this data, constantly creating and evolving user profiles on the back end. It’s not dissimilar to China’s Sesame Score, which is essentially an all-encompassing rating that combines credit scores with social factors. That rating can then be used to exclude individuals from certain parts of society. Sift’s intentions don’t seem nefarious. But who’s to say Sift can’t decide one day to deem certain user types as fraudulent and ban them from making online transactions? Is that too much power for one company?

So far, Sift’s work has helped businesses to save billions. But the potential for a data organization like Sift to amass too much power is real. A catastrophic data breach or a malfunction of Sift’s machine learning to go haywire would lead to chaos in the world of online transactions.

Reprinted with permission from: PrivacyParent.com