The big data debate
THERE is a mantra repeated in the circles of cyber security and information security sectors: “If the product is free, then YOU are the product.” That may appear innocuous on the surface, but it is much more sinister than most people give it credit for.
Tamer Asfahani speaks to developers, information security experts and deceivers about the importance of protecting your online persona and the information that’s attached to it. Using Watch Dogs and Quantum Break as case studies, he asks whether or not we can learn anything from these games as technology advances in society. Although only games, they are able to simulate an alternate reality which, as we’ve seen over the last few years, we would never have thought would have been possible.
Just think about it for just a moment. What do you have access to for free? Think about your social media accounts, your subscriptions to websites, your web-based email addresses, profiles for online shopping platforms as well as other miscellaneous accounts which you’ve no doubt signed up to years before but have never visited again.
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Now think about all those platforms, services and accounts, and ask yourself if you’ve ever paid money for them. You may think you haven’t, but in truth you’ve given away something much more valuable than any currency: your personal information. In a lot of the cases too, you’ve relinquished your rights to whatever content or information you put on those platforms.
Professor Alan Woodward
This underlying fact is the root of games such as Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs and Remedy’s Control. The power of data is still completely dismissed by the majority of us who enjoy free access to social media, or name tests or apps that show us what we’ll look like in the future as older versions of ourselves, say.
Professor Alan Woodward is an internationally renowned computer security expert with particular expertise and current research interests in cyber security, covert communications, forensic computing and image/ signal processing.
All of those services are using your data and building a profile about you and the things you engage with.
He worked for the UK government for many years and continues to provide advice to governmental organisations such as Europol, as well as private sector organisations.
That data is then sold, as we know, to advertisers and marketeers who then use that information to build a more detailed profile of you, so they’re better able to target you to sell things to as a unique/ discrete individual. Or to sell your information on to other organisations.
Sam Lake
Watch Dogs Legion: a big data alternate reality