Your data with destiny

I met Mikko Hypponen when giving a keynote at and F-secure conference. It was a delight to watch his TEDx talk – and reflect on the truly significant implications of the role governments are now playing in monitoring us all. In chapter 5 of No Straight Lines I explored the realities and challenges of how our lives are transformed by data in its many varied forms, and, how this has significant political implications.

The introduction begins, as the shape of our world evolves, we are also in political transformation, both in terms of the political relationship between the individual and commercial organisations and the large Politics of how we organise and run our societies. What should government look like in a non-linear world? Are we creating and running the right systems in the right way? Why is it too many people are disengaged with the process of democracy and civil organisation?

An extract from the book

Data, democracy and identity: who would have thought even in 2005, that consumer politics and societal politics would revolve around data, who has it, who owns it and how it is used, combined with the legal frameworks that protect us as citizens.

Your destiny with data: What happens therefore to the data security, privacy and identity management once aggregated dynamic databases can be accessed and used? And the even bigger question is: how much of one’s identity do people want to display as they navigate the networked world and how much of their personal information will they be prepared to give away, or even reveal, to get something of value back in return?

From an individual perspective, we leave continuous trails of data, plumes of bits of information. It’s the personal exhaust from our digital interactions. These are the shadows and messy footprints of our daily lives. In the highly competitive world of marketing and commerce, this data is being recognised as increasingly important, with companies desperate to harvest, aggregate and refine it for commercial gain. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, published a paper in which his research found that the peaks and troughs of Google searches would be predictive in the demand for certain goods and services.

Yet our destiny with data is complex. There are legitimate concerns about who actually owns this information, and when our identities can be pieced together via data flows, privacy becomes a key battleground.

In this talk Hypponen explains why in the context of the NSA and GCHQ the monitoring of all citizens has real and lasting consequences to what we call democracy. The TEDx intro to Mikko’s talk states, recent events have highlighted, the fact that the United States is performing blanket surveillance on any foreigner whose data passes through an American entity — whether they are suspected of wrongdoing or not. This means that, essentially, every international user of the internet is being watched, says Mikko Hypponen. An important rant, wrapped with a plea: to find alternative solutions to using American companies for the world’s information needs.

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