A Double-Edged Sword: Horror Stories Aside, Big Data Does More GoodThan Harm

People worried about identity or data theft need to think "big picture"

There are plenty of good ways to hide your digital footprint – from 'incognito mode' to using a VPN. But let's face it, most people are not going to go through all that just for the "privacy" of not having, say, Amazon track your shopping habits or Google reading your email. Sure, some highly dedicated privacy militants are perhaps successful in drastically reducing their presence, but it's pretty darn hard to completely avoid an "internet existence." Even if you don't show yourself, others can "out" you; perhaps inadvertently. You, of course, want to protect your data with the best ID theft services possible. But protection doesn't mean forgoing the modern world of online shopping or social media. Your data is a part of big data, probably whether you like it or not. This fact isn't, however, necessarily bad.

There have certainly been some alarming stories. Big data is defined by Oxford as, "extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions." So, if your address, identification numbers, tax returns, educational records, medical info – which for some, include those popular DNA lineage reports – are all collated and accessible, it's not inconceivable that your data could be hacked. Over four years ago, Forbes had a piece claiming that in the year 2016, some 400 serious data breaches occurred, targeting mass amounts of data from organizations such as a hospital, a mental-health non-profit, and the National Network of Abortion Funds, a group that may or may not be controversial depending on your vantage point. It's pretty self-evident that hackers weren't breaking into medical-related organizations to leave messages of support or anonymous donations.

And of course, the bad guys didn't quit in 2016. Since then, there have been over 30 extremely major data breaches at huge, respected companies and organizations, as well as at some rather personal sites. In 2020, adult streaming site CAM4's Elasticsearch server was breached, laying bare some 10 billion records. Information such as users' full names, payment logs, emails, sexual orientations, IP addresses, password hashes, chats, and more. It–Not the kind of info most want to be uncovered.

Some 885 million sensitive financial records going back over 16 years were reportedly leaked after an attack on the First American Financial Corporation in May 2019. And of course, some will remember two recent facebook third-party app dataset leaks involving hundreds of millions of records – account names, comments, likes, reactions, etc. This year there was the Chinese social media agency Sociallarks, which had no one to blame but themselves for a breach of 200 million+ records; their server wasn't encrypted or password-protected. It's hard to blame a hacker for stealing what was essentially public knowledge.

So, yes. There are a lot of ways to get dinged when you put your data out into the ether. But technology is always a double-edged sword. The question here is which edge is shaper? The risk or reward side of the blade? On aggregate, there's a good argument to be made that big data keeps you safer rather than more exposed. Let'scite some supporting evidence for that claim. When was the last time you got a "someone may have signed in to your account from XX location" email or notification? Most of the time, it's just you traveling or signing in on a new device. But the speed of that detection is impressive and only improving. Financial institutions now often run fraud detection algorithms that make use of big data to spot anomalies. These real-time data mining tools do a bunch of complicated math and put a percentage on whether the transaction looks kosher or not. If the system knows enough about you and your consumption patterns, it's very likely going to spot anything out of the ordinary and jump on it faster than any other detection system – human or machine – has ever been able to do previously.

We may also not be far away from biometric data used in a blockchain. Put simply, if a blockchain-protected server (which cannot be altered) has your retinal scan or fingerprint and that's how you authorize payments or access websites, etcetera, that's going to prove a pretty hard nut to crack – even for the best of the devious. Finally, it's time people stopped looking at big data as the collection of their data; it's so much more than that. As Oxford explained above, these AI algorithms are looking for: "patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions." You aren't really a "person," you're almost literally one in several billion. The corporations who use big data aren't that interested in you – they're interested in how you fit into instructive patterns.

Identify theft and data breaches are serious problems and it's impossible to rule out leaks from huge data collectors. But on the flip side, it's going to become increasingly hard to hack these machines as they literally learn from each mistake. And it's almost a certainty that being watched over by "big brother" – for lack of a less sinister term – is more likely to result in you being warned of danger than being exposed. The protection edge of the sword is already sharper, and it's a good bet that it will only get more powerful, not less.

AUTHOR:

Erik Richardson is a Dutch-American traveler, commenter, writer and student. He is interested in culture, tourism, global affairs related to Asia, food, literary arts and is fond of cats. Richardson spends his time traveling between major Asian capitals.