Harnessing Technology To Kill User Privacy

Harnessing Technology -To kill user privacy, this is what is going on around the world in the madness of data collection. Data intelligence became a sexist thing and a job overnight. Data is the new fuel and may be the costliest item on the shelves. Questions come in, “What is my privacy in the data collection race”? Are companies not doing experiments on me without my knowledge?

Privacy – What is it !!!

Let’s race for data intelligence; this is the mantra for every company on the planet today. Do we really have privacy any more? What all the data is and up to what extent it is being collected, more than 90% of us are not even aware of.

Some sources on the internet (reliable sources) claim that Facebook collects information like connected computers, phones, connected TVs, and other web-connected devices from the internet service provider or mobile operator. This is to analyze your financial capacity, taste, and segmentation to serve you better.

While you browse and login to your favorite time-pass social site, it tracks your mouse movements, click stream, type of apps, file names, and types of files on the device so that you will be given social treatment as per your taste.

Amazon, Microsoft, and even Uber have joined Google and other tech titans in actively opposing the California Consumer Privacy Act. Google, AT&T, Facebook, and Verizon were four of the first corporations to back the fight against the initiative. Facebook and Verizon eventually withdrew their support, and we all know why (Cambridge Analytica).

What Are You Doing …I Can See You !!!

Somebody mentioned it to me some time back, and I laughed then. The day you decided to come online, you actually said “no to privacy”. Now it’s even worse, as we can even use radio signals to see through walls, so there’s no need to be online.

Signals can now be used to monitor a person’s precise movements through a solid wall. What else and how far we will go we can’t answer now. But all this development has its pros and cons.

On top of the blurry live image, AI can now create real pictures to give it a full meaning and description. Thanks to artificial intelligence, or should we curse AI for this? Let’s wait for a while.

Your smart phone (extra smart, actually) records and decodes your personal conversation, and the next day you are served with ads related to your conversation the day before.

A researcher at MIT has been developing technology for detecting people and their movements behind a solid wall using radio waves. The approach relies on cutting-edge machine learning to interpret the signals.

Smart Computers vs Over Smart Computers

It’s been said computers can be called smart only after passing the turning test. What if the computer gets much smarter beyond just passing and failing? What level of smartness computers will attain when they intentionally fail the same test. This is food for thought.

These days, we use maps to travel and find a traffic-free short route, take pictures with the location and date when they were taken, and store information through the device’s settings, such as “GPS location, camera, or photos. How we use the camera on our phones does provide the app maker with information on what we see through the camera, and it does send all that information to their servers.

Have you noticed that after clicking a picture, your phone says “It looks like you are in the Sandton area in Johannesburg, South Africa”? We feel happy, but have we ever realized what we are doing?

Almost all mobile apps suck up a lot of personal data about you when you use them or even let them sit on your phone without even being used. These apps are listening to your conversations by tapping into your device’s microphone. Maybe these apps do take pictures of you every time for everything without even your knowing.

No matter how suspicious it has seemed that Amazon is encouraging us to put listening devices in every room of our homes, the company has always said that its Echo assistants are not listening in on or recording conversations. Over and over again, company spokespeople have promised that they only start recording if someone says the wake word, “Alexa”.

Do we really have nothing to hide

Some arguments from some governments are coming as if, if you are a clean citizen, then there is “nothing to hide”. But this argument also mistakenly suggests that privacy is something only criminals desire. In fact, we choose to do many things in private—sing in the shower, make love, confide in family and friends—even though they are not wrong or illegal.

Below image is going viral on social media these days. (Edited and Added on 21st June 20:30 GMT+2)

Who would not be embarrassed if all of their most intimate details were exposed? Fences and curtains are ways to ensure a measure of privacy, not indicators of criminal behavior. Privacy is a fundamental part of a dignified life. On the contrary, AI and machine learning are poised to give analytics a new and even more impactful role in driving our future in a much more secure manner.

DataIntelligence only – Who cares for User Privacy

Will artificial intelligence and machine learning kill privacy? It’s very difficult to say anything with accuracy here, but for sure, the algorithms underneath are increasingly used by almost all companies and social media platforms to make decisions about us, often without our consent.

Data protection is merely an obsession or a basic human right; the definition is getting lost. User privacy is the lowest priority with all the data collection factories around us. No one knows how much protection #GDPR is actually going to bring back.

Emerging Technologies & Privacy

Could AI-powered multi-factor authentication will kill the passwords, so something that does not exist will not be stolen. It will bring something that runs seamlessly while protecting our privacy. ML technology will play a growing role in redefining authentication and authorization.

But even as new public concerns over privacy have emerged in recent years, machine learning is helping and preventing cyberattacks. Metadata from emails, without compromising users’ privacy, is helping and differentiating cyber savior criminals to keep their attacks on attacks moving forward to kill this chain.

Privacy!! Does it really exist in today’s time when technology allows you to monitor even your personal movement in your dark bedroom through solid walls?

Question – Social media, AI, quantum computing, and blockchain – deadly combo or a blessing?

Social networking websites are “deliberately killing privacy” in order to gain more and more revenue with emerging technologies, aka artificial intelligence and machine learning, by gathering almost all user activities.

Regulatory Changes – Needed for AI

• Ensuring people receive fair and equitable treatment.
• Safeguarding consumers: By spending more time on travel sites, you pay a high ticket cost.
• Directing autonomous vehicles: who should be responsible for losses?
• Protecting critical infrastructure, like an army base or war zone
• Health care: operating on humans or denial of services
• Data Security: When designing algorithms and use cases for them, companies should ensure the perpetual security of data collection, storage, and processing.
• Data Privacy: Innovate Behind Privacy not in front of privacy, a ‘defend in depth’ approach is recommended with data encryption at every stage.
• Data Consent: It should be the user’s choice of what data they share with companies with rights to forget. In the case of a compromise, they must be made aware of it and compensate for it.
• Data minimization: It is only sensible for companies to harvest only the data they really need. They should also maintain it for only a limited amount of time with the users consent.

These initiatives and efforts are now facing the biggest opposition from some of the most prominent tech companies. Pouring millions of dollars into an effort to kill the proposal

Points to Note:

All credits, if any, remain with the original contributor only. We have tried to highlight issues around user privacy in technological advancements. GDPR gave some relief to user data privacy, though.

Books & Other Material Referred

• Open Internet
• AILabPage (group of self-taught engineers) members hands-on lab work.

Feedback & Further Question

Do you have any questions about Deep Learning or Machine Learning? Leave a comment or ask your question via email. Will try my best to answer it.

Conclusion – Voice assistants are the new marketing battleground. But the dark secret at the heart of AI and ML is yet to be reached. The self-driving car’s underlying AI technology, known as deep learning, has proved very powerful. AI and ML are the topics of much debate; certainly, we would not be able to cover everything here. Data-sharing scandals continue to mount and rise. A new proposal in California offers a potential solution: the California Consumer Privacy Act would require companies to disclose the types of information they collect, like data used to target ads, and allow the public to opt out of having their information sold.

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