Does privacy still exist?

Have you ever received that one message from the French-beauty brand Sephora saying: "You have recently visited one of our shops. We would like to know more about your experience"? Well, I have. Or, what about the "people you may know" on Facebook? How do they know that we know them? And who is actually them, who is behind this?

I could give you many more examples, because indeed, this is what happens to us every single day and probably more than once a day. Especially since the Internet has started being a constant part of our daily life, our personal data have also started circulating and more and more data about us have been collected.

According to the report Big Data in The Global South Project:

"Facebook stores 111 MG of users information on average, and, according to a former Google's President, Eric Schhmidt, 5 exabytes are created everyday on the Internet, an amount that corresponds to the whole amount of information generated by our civilization since its beginning until 2003" (Institute of Technology & Society, 2016, p.4).

What happens to all that information?

The answer is: we often don't know and it is not our fault. Every time we sign in a new website, we are required to insert our personal information and then to accept the terms and conditions, thus allowing the website, the company or whoever works for them, to make use of our personal data.

There is an incredible lack of transparency both from companies and institutions on what is being done with our information.

Going back to the Facebook's "people you may know", the social network was caught, not long ago, in a misuse of its users data in order to suggest those friends. According to Forbes, Facebook first admitted to doing so explaining how they combined data with other factors such as location, education, mutual friends etc. Not long after, however, the social network denied it was using location data, but it subsequently backtracked, admitting it had carried out a test on an unspecified number of users for four weeks at the end of last year.

Well, this is just one small example. Another one, and in this case related to a governamental institution, could be the Passenger Name Record (PNR) and Advanced Passenger Information (API) system, in Brasil. These systems were introduced in 2012 by the Brazilian National Civil Aviation Agency with the aim of storing and transmitting a wide range of data on each and every international flight, its passengers and crew members coming in or out of or simply with a stopover in Brazilian territory. The information collected is sebsequently transmitted to the Federal Police Department before each flight. The reason they give for it is preventing and suppressing illegal actions.

Now, although this last example may bring some advantages, such as facilitating the jobs of governement agencies in tracking persons of interest and criminals, it also brings some negative implications. Among these, the fact that the mandatory accumulation of personal data of millions of individuals with no control or criteria seems like a shameless attack on personal privacy- especially, if we consider that the transmission of such data is compulsory only for the public at large, but not for private flights. In addition- and this may be applied to any kind of stored data by any kind of company or institution- it is not sure where and how securely this information will be stored and for how long.

Orwell's "1984" has become the reality

Altough very sad to admit, Orwell had well foreseen our future. What is happening now, whether we like it or not is that we are constantly being watched. We are under surveillance of companies and governments. At this very moment, who knows whom and how many people are looking at and making use of our personal data, may it be for marketing purposes, job hiring (e.g. cybervetting) or public safety.

It does not really matter what the reason for this is. What matters is that our privacy is being harmed every day, at every moment. Or at least, this is how it feels.

Sources

Fox-Brewster, T. (2016). Facebook Is Playing Games With Your Privacy And There's Nothing You Can Do About It. Retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/06/29/facebook-location-tracking-friend-games/#1ef278523348

Institute of Technology & Society. (2016). Big Data and the Global South Project: Report on the Brazilian case studies. http://itsrio.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Big-Data-in-the-Global-South-Project.pdf