Privacy & Confidentiality

New media has opened a world of opportunity for sharing information, but with so much of our personal and business information being sent our privacy and confidentiality can be compromised.

While NSA surveillance grabs the headlines these days, the extent we willingly share our data to others – whether its friends, grandmas, and corporations – is astounding in its own right.

IBM’s Watson is an artificially intelligent group of services which among other things, can understand natural language at a massive scale. Working with your banking provider, it can find a Twitter profile and using the information on it to tie the two together. Even more, it can conduct psycholinguistic analysis; applications of which include figuring out how receptive you are to a certain product (e.g. if one recently had a baby and tweets they’re upset with a diaper brand) or assess your personality traits for an employer.

Our repeated choice to share our information combined with the wholesale collection of our data is concerning. The centralized nature of the cloud and the fact that too many new media enterprises fail t0 properly encrypt their data leaves us vulnerable to security breaches. As users, we need to be exceedingly cautious with what we choose to share, and it is best to work under the assumption that everything we post will likely surface in one way or another.