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The Perfect Digital Storm

On Saturday morning I sat, coffee in hand, listening to BBC Radio 4′s ‘The Forum’ where Bridget Kendall brings in some of the world’s most eminent minds to tackle the big questions of our age. Saturday’s topic was ‘Tracking and Surveillance’.

In the show, the panel asked how much ‘the state’ does and indeed should know about our online behaviour in the interests of security and efficiency. The show was brilliant and highlighted some obvious but sometimes unspoken truths: we use Google to find directions and our exact location can be traced, we use DropBox to share files and our private videos can be accessed, we use online shopping to purchase food and our diet can be analysed.

And we are starting to see the outputs of this already. Companies who engage ‘digital brand tracking’ tools, for example, can use big data to get a sense of how well their brand is ‘known and liked’ by scanning all comments made in relation to that brand and categorising them into groups; brands can target ever narrowing customer segments to increase their conversion rates with more precisely tailored products or services; people can seek out and connect with other people anywhere in the world; companies can ‘retarget’ you by serving up ads on Facebook of things you searched on Ebay the week before!

In general, I agreed with the overall conclusions of the commentators: in isolation, all of this activity can be justified as security, and even as a way of improving productivity but questions need to be about how far this goes. For example, a point was made that what seems like harmless data now – such as how many cigarettes your buy, or how much alcohol you consume – could be used against you if the law changes or if insurers are able to use that data in your policy quote, for instance.

One thing the programme really did highlight is how in the dark we remain as individuals about what data is being collected and how it is being used. For example, if your movements are tracked for work purposes (if you’re in logistics for example), is that data still tracked on coffee breaks and outside of work? That said, there are campaigners who are looking at this trend closely and they are starting to speak out. The Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch and English PEN, along with German internet activist Constanze Kurz, have filed papers at the European Court of Human Rights bringing action against the UK Government. They argue that GCHQ, the UK’s spy agency, has acted illegally by collecting so much data leaving and entering the UK, including the content of social media messages and emails. Read more here.

Reflecting on the show over the weekend, I had a thought: when you step back from it all and start to align the pieces you realise that something is brewing. With governments, retailers and others being able to access, monopolise and exploit our data at the press of a button, with more and more leaks surfacing and with the rise of ‘big data’, mobility and cross device functionality, we could be on the brink of a perfect digital storm.

To give you a sense of scale here, the scope of data being collected by companies and governments today is mind-boggling. According to IBM, we now create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per year and the amount of data we are generating is increasing at such an astounding rate that 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in just the last two years.

With data capture and sifting moving so quickly, it seems we’re either need to speak up, or get used to a new form of control. Of course, there are pros to this level of surveillance. For example, this deeper level of insight allows companies and governments to use digital data to make predictions and better service our needs before before we even realise we have the need. Retailers, for example, can now scan reels of social data to decide on where next to open their super store, or policy makers can look at the national sentiment to identify and craft new policies. But there is a downside. Now more than ever we can be tracked, scrutinised, grouped and targeted.

However you feel about this, there is no denying it is happening and when big data, mobile access and technology collide, we are going to be in the middle of one almighty digital storm.

Click here to listen to the BBC R4 programme.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Digitia .