Data privacy dilemma: slow humanity in technology iterations

We have created and become part of the data torrent, and we are becoming more transparent.

In 1993, the New Yorker published a classic comic titled "On the Internet, no one knows that you are a dog sitting in front of a computer". Everyone knows you are a dog. "

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The New Yorker Comic

As the Internet carries more and more functions of life, shopping, socializing, travel, etc., virtual identity and real identity are achieving unprecedented unification. Through the Internet, strangers will also be able to restore a true "I", or To be good or to be evil is all in one thought.

The endless stream of privacy leaks has torn the bright coats of Internet services and exposed the truth behind them in the spotlight-the convenient services we enjoy are the result of privacy data exchange. As life becomes more intelligent, the isolation between reality and the Internet is weakened. Privacy is like a sword of Damocles, and it is crumbling.

Technological advancement and slow human nature

The importance of privacy security is not only due to the exposure of a lot of information. The deeper reason is that after the privacy is exposed, it will interfere with user decisions or tilt the decision to a more preferred way for privacy owners. Especially in this digital era, after the Internet is enlarged, it is easier for people Will be affected by the media.

I have to mention a keyword here, "information cocoon room". Its definition is the phenomenon that people's information field will be habitually guided by their own interests, so that their lives are trapped in cocoons like silkworm cocoons. The formation of the information cocoon is inseparable from the acquisition of private data and the improvement of the algorithm recommendation mechanism. Everyone tends to get the information they are interested in, which is by nature.

However, when these interests are deliberately used and personalized recommendations are excessive, we lose the opportunity to receive other information. Although the Internet provides more information choices and seems more free, under deliberate guidance, what we see is only our own Echo, even in an era of information explosion, we are only in touch with the information around the cocoon room.

Earlier, Baidu CEO Li Yanhong talked about privacy issues at the China High-level Development Forum, saying, "Under the premise of privacy protection, Chinese consumers are often willing to authorize use of certain personal data in exchange for more convenient services." In the phrase.

Technological evolution is a typical incentive for prominent privacy issues. The more life functions carried on the Internet, the more privacy information will be obtained. Whether it is an account system, cookies, or fingerprint recognition, image recognition, etc., while providing convenience services, they are also acquiring the most private individuals. Data, through these data, can even restore a "living person."

Of course, the purpose of technological advancement is not to obtain our privacy, but to use this data to create business needs. It is not difficult to observe that a large number of applications currently obtain private data in the form of shared data, pre-fetch, and finally converted into more accurate services. Shopping applications such as Taobao and JD recommend product stimuli directly to consumers; such as Ctrip and Feizhu recommending travel routes based on positioning information. However, the disadvantages of these methods are particularly prominent. Users not only lose the right to know how to use privacy, but also bear the risk of privacy abuse and disclosure.

In addition to technological advances, people's insensitivity to privacy is also the cause of privacy issues. It has been pointed out that the most frequently filled-in place of WeChat registration is not "China" but "Andorra". The root cause is still that most people do not want to expose their true information on the Internet; now live broadcasts, short videos The upsurge of the problem is to dissolve the distance between the real identity and the virtual identity, and even present the real life appearance as a selling point, and privacy issues have not really received people's attention.

The speed of human psychological evolution and the speed of the explosion of information technology do not match, which directly leads to our natural insensitivity to the loss of personal privacy in the digital age . Many times, only when there is a privacy-related accident scandal, users will pay attention to the whereabouts of their privacy data, and then return to the old state after a while.

Fortunately, a series of privacy leaks is accelerating people's attention to privacy, especially the technological wave and data assetization trend set off by the blockchain are increasing the ordinary people's attention to privacy issues. As time goes by, Attention will only increase.

Privacy Protection and Value Internet

When it comes to privacy protection, we must first clarify what privacy is. From a jurisprudential perspective, privacy is what has happened in accordance with ethics and legitimacy, but cannot or is unwilling to show personnel or things, emotional activities, etc. Except for our personal account and password, browsing history, chat history and even shopping history are all within the scope of privacy.

The results of this information leak are terrible. The film "Absolute Control" once described such a scenario: information about smart homes and car systems was stolen, all the lives of the protagonist's family were exposed to the hacker's vision, and the hacker began a series of criminal activities …

Movie "Absolute Control" poster

This film, which came out in 2016, is quite forward-looking: the era of the Internet of Everything allows people to enjoy the convenience brought by technology, but it also brings the threat of privacy leakage, and even measures must be taken to protect personal information security . It should be noted that privacy protection is not a refusal to use private data. As long as a reasonable authorization process is found, a reliable sharing channel is found and the risk of privacy abuse is avoided, then privacy use is only logical. Having said all this, we also need to reflect on why privacy protection has exploded in the past two years?

The first reason is because of the development of the value Internet. Recalling the development of the Internet, in the early days we used virtual identities and rarely exposed real information to the network. Now many applications require real-name authentication before they can be used. The "gold content" of the data itself is incomparable. In addition, with the evolution of 5G, blockchain, artificial intelligence and many other technologies, the links between the real world and the network world are gradually opened, the interaction between users and the network becomes more frequent, and the network carries more and more functions, such as shopping , Social, transaction, investment, etc., the sensitive data generated must inevitably require thorough security protection.

The second reason is policy support. In the past, the EU ’s “Strict Personal Data Protection Regulations in History” and “General Data Protection Regulations” were promulgated. Later, the “Data Security Management Measures” issued by the China National Internet Information Office in May 2019. These policies and regulations also formally protect privacy From verbal utterances to implemented technical characteristics. At the same time, it should be noted that the purpose of management is to "utilize", these policies can be said to discover high-value privacy data in disguise and provide unprecedented business opportunities-only legal can be able to dig out the value of data with great fanfare.

Of course, for enterprises, the past behavior of hiding private data is also coming to an end. Enterprises must learn to deal with data privacy issues properly. The author enumerates several measures:

First, privacy protection should return the right to privacy and decision to the user himself. It is quite ironic that this is also the point where the vast majority of Internet applications make "users feel" to the extreme, forcing users' use rights and privacy acquisition together forcibly, disagreeing with the privacy terms can not use the application, which is comparable to "Bawang Terms ". Keep in mind that for many functions, private data is only a dispensable role.

Second, privacy protection cannot be based on moral self-discipline. Privacy protection requires reliable means, such as laws, procedures, and so on. It is necessary to use coercive force to protect privacy, and not rely on credit and ethics alone. We must know that privacy is not only data, but also wealth. To put it bluntly, privacy is "money". It is obviously not a wise choice to use credit ethics to restrict interest temptation. The efficiency of coercive force to manage privacy will be significantly higher.

Third, find secure, reliable, and efficient ways to utilize private data. There is no solution to privacy issues. Benefiting from the development of cryptography, private data can be prevented from being leaked through cryptographic encryption; however, it should be noted that data encryption will inevitably lead to a decline in computing performance, so it is also necessary to distinguish between private data. In order to maximize the effectiveness, different measures should be taken for different data forms.

There is a saying in the film "Absolute Control": "Privacy is not citizenship, but privilege." In fact, privacy should be the most basic right of every citizen, but in the past, we have never realized The exercise of this right has made privacy a "privilege", but thankfully the right to privacy is returning and people are reclaiming privacy scattered across the Internet.

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