DO OUR PHONES KNOW US TOO WELL? Melissa Bell

DO OUR PHONES KNOW US TOO WELL?

Ever wondered if your phone is listening to you? Spoken about a new item or show and suddenly a suspiciously personalized advertisement appears on your phone within a week. It often feels surprising and perhaps even useful but then starts to feel a little worrying, however with a bit of a reassurance often labelling it as a ‘coincidence’ it feels more useful than anything dangerous. The question remains is there more going on underneath the surface?

All over the world companies have come to the realisation that one of the most important assets of the 21st century is consumer data. Businesses now gather large amounts of quantitative and qualitative data to help them gain a better understanding of how consumers behave online, defining their overall demographics and identifying how they can improve their overall customer experience. Every click and new website accessed generates an online profile of ourselves through Cookies an online piece of text that a Web server stores on a user's hard disk. Therefore, Cookies allow a website to store information on a user's machine and later retrieve it. The data collected consists of not just the traditional age, name and gender, but as Harvard historian Rebecca Lemov has noted, it also includes “Tweets, Facebook likes, Twitches, Google searches, online comments, one-click purchases, even viewing but skipping over a photograph in your feed.”

The plain lack of transparency when it comes to data leaks is as clear as day, with companies only releasing information years after the incident has occurred that offers no real help to the people who’s security has been breached. Often, we don't realise the vast number of data leaks that happen daily because only the most dramatic and sensational seem newsworthy like the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal. But some of the less noteworthy leaks of data pose a higher level of danger than you would expect. For example, In July 2019 over 100 million people’s sensitive financial information from ‘Capital One’ such as social security and bank account numbers were exposed. The information was gathered from credit card applications submitted to the Virginia based bank from 2005 to 2019 that had been later stored by the company. The cause of this breach was a cloud firewall configuration vulnerability which ‘Capital One’ reassures us has since been fixed, however the question still stands: how was this allowed to happen? Should there not have been legislation in place to prevent this from adding to the vast list of consumer information leakage.

It is painfully obvious there are negative and often worrying impacts of businesses gathering consumer data, however, the use of this data has the potential to strengthen economic competitiveness and productivity growth across the UK economy, whether that is through innovation or new products, promotion processes, organisational methods and markets, or even enabling entirely new business models to form and thrive. On a final note, with the correct laws and regulations enforced by our government on companies, protecting ourselves, and even myself as I am writing this article, will help us develop into a more intuitive and informative society.