DATA PRIVACY
THE END OF
PRIVACY? US Senator Dick Durbin: “Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night?”
Mark Zuckerberg: (uncomfortable silence) “No.” Sen. Durbin: “If you’ve messaged anyone this week, would you share with us the names of the people you’ve messaged?” Zuckerberg: “No, I would probably not choose to do that publicly here.” Sen. Orrin Hatch: “So, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Zuckerberg: “Senator, we run ads.” Sen. Hatch: “I see.” Sen. Bill Nelson: “I’m communicating with my friends on Facebook and indicate that I love a certain kind of chocolate. And, all of a sudden, I start receiving advertisements for chocolate. What if I don’t want to receive those commercial advertisements?”
Data privacy was one of the hot debates of 2018. In this progressively interconnected world, data is the new oil. It is your biggest asset and can also be the greatest liability, if not handled properly. By Shilpi Chakravarty
A
visibly uncomfortable Mark Zuckerberg grappling with a barrage of questions during his 12-hour Congressional hearing following the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal would surely go down as one of the most eventful moments of recent times. Data privacy was one of the hot debates of 2018. The most talked about exposé on personal data leaks were the Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked Facebook, and Google’s 24x7 location tracking. Smartphones with GPS chips in every hand, connected vehicles and miniaturized sensors, have turned the whole world into a digital network. In this progressively interconnected world, data is the new oil. It is your biggest asset and can also be the greatest liability, if not handled properly. No wonder a majority of 1,500 professionals who participated in Geospatial World Readers’ Survey agree to this (See Graph1, Pg 36).
www.geospatialworld.net | March-April 2019
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