The What, Why, & How Of Safe-guarding People Data - The Oil Of Today's Digital World

At present, with the digitisation of most service providers, Web, Social Media, Smartphones, lot amount of people data is being generated and stored with those organizations. In last two decades, emergence of powerful yet cheaper computer hardware, cloud computing, Big Data technologies and developments in Machine Learning (ML) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) made it practical to crunch huge volumes of data and mine valuable insights out of it.

- Phani Arega,

This contributed to people data being appreciated as a valuable raw material asset perhaps more sought after than oil. As per a study by J.PMorgan Chase quoted by New York Times, in 2011 data of each unique user was worth approximately $4 to Facebook and $24 to Google.

It became common for Internet companies to offer a free service, attract users to share their personal data and monetize that data by selling it or intelligence derived from it or services based on it, to third parties. Following are the potential issues when an individual’s data gets into other’s hands:

Violation of privacy

Identity theft: fraudsters that get hold of adequate PII of a person (subject) can impersonate the subject to commit crimes or to operate subject’s bank accounts, credit cards to steal money. Per an identity fraud study, $16 billion was stolen from 15.4 million Americans in 2016 and $15.3 billion was stolen from 13.1 million Americans in 2015.

When some secret information of individual’s health or sexual orientation is made public, it could lead to social stigma, adverse effect on career.

Even if not revealed to public, such secret information falling into wrong hands makes the subject vulnerable to blackmail. For instance leaker locker ransomware blackmailed victims by threatening to expose their secret data and photos and demanded ransom.

In future following factors are going to further increase the amount of people data as well as damage potential of a data leakage: