Our Data Problem

Hello!!

Well hello. Thanks for spending the time reading my first blog. I’ve tried starting a blog many times with no success, mainly because it’s difficult to find the time to write a blog and stay consistent. I’m going to try this again and see if its something I can continue regularly. Since I am an avid technologist, I will probably range my topics a little but try to stay true to what I feel is my next calling in life: cybersecurity.

The Great Hack

I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called The Great Hack. I thought it pretty much summed up my sentiments of data gathering and analysis I’ve had for several years.

Spoiler Alert! If you plan to watch the movie, or have watched it, you can skip this section. The movie is based around the Cambridge Analytica company that supposedly help shape public opinion on many political topics throughout the world using data it gathered from Facebook and creating profiles of people who they would need to target to change the voting outlook to whoever hired them. It follows the lives of a couple previous CA employees as they try to expose CA on their ethically questionable decisions regarding data they got from Facebook to help “market” to people on those same platforms.

The Data Problem

The whole structure of current data mining and analysis practices are based on financial strategies business owners would dream of. Think about it: what is the best product you can sell and make a profit on? A product that 1) no one knows the true profit & cost, 2) is free for your customers to use and 3) is wrapped up in a black box that no one can possibly reproduce.

Next: you have your customers organize and prioritize that data for you so you can easily find out the value the customer put on that data, and how people will react to that information. You put it under the guise of features that will allow your customer to share or organize their data more efficiently.

Then: You tell the business world you have a way to market to anyone you want. But we won’t tell you the secret sauce you can just use and trust our system will do what we say it will. But you have to pay us to use our system to market to your customers.

Finally: You tell the business (under)world that you have millions of data points and/or data that can be purchased (for a large sum) to be used for marketing or analysis. But we will keep those contracts secret in case the world finds out and questions the legality and ethical standing of what we are doing.

The Profit

You see how many places they can profit from? But on whose backs? We, as users, freely give it to them. Why? Because we need a good product that can help us in this busy world. Honestly, we don’t care about the money because what we don’t know won’t hurt (or benefit) us, right? We haven’t been given a taste of the money that we could get because if we did, boy, would that change our minds on what the companies are doing with our data.

No Competition

Why would a competitor or any company, try to make a competing product when free is the best price to have? How would that business model work in this time. “Oh, lets keep people’s data safe because we are passionate about giving the users back their data.” The customer would be like “Uhh, don’t really care about it because I like the free price, what benefit will I get to work on a sub-par product that I have to pay for, when I can get THIS for free?” Someone who even tries to get into the business are either bought out or are forced into venture capitalists who are looking only to boost their market share first before making a profit. Just take a look at some of the paid offerings in email clients, ProtonMail, CounterMail, HushMail.... Not endorsing any of them, but they seriously look like they came out of the 2000’s.

As soon as you have competitors in the market, even if those companies had customer privacy first, all corporations would have to adjust their practices to account for the competitors, lower their prices, and spend more money on marketing their product instead of developing the product. So the best way is to develop the best app out there while making customers think they are getting a good deal, by providing a product they want, for a price they think is fair, while hiding behind EULA’s, secret sauces... your data (and the analytics of your data), and big wads of cash.

The First Step

There is so much that can be said here with I’m sure some better ideas out there, but I think a first step would have to be some sort of education and exposure program. I think there are several platforms that are doing that now. News platforms are starting to get on board, hashtags are being made. Some level of exposure on what data is worth, and help people understand what they are giving up when they sign up for that free service. As I said, this part is simple, and so much more can be said here, but hey, we have to start somewhere.

TL;DR

This is far from a comprehensive review on current data, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll put it in another blog.

Companies are hiding behind the word FREE to sell the products they are making because they know they can make more money selling the data their customers have organized to the highest bidder, than if they were to charge for the product.

Competitors have almost NO possibility to enter the market because they don’t have access to the level of financing “free” would provide them.

A potential solution is getting people pumped up about making money off their data so they know how much they are losing out.

The Great Hack brought together some fantastic thoughts and exposure of our current data and how its being used. Trust me, its a hard road to get the users back their data, but its possible.