Data, data everywhere....

Recently I seem to have had several conversations with friends expressing surprise that it was all a bit spooky that they seemed to be getting online adverts related to what they'd been searching for or had looked at whilst browsing. 

Not spooky once you briefly explain personalisation or contextual targeting - minor paranoia moments for some! What was really clear in these conversations was the breadth of data we may be handing over on a daily basis without necessarily thinking about what it is and how it could be used.  

Not many people I spoke to read privacy statements, they just click and go. If they did subsequently want to opt out they didn’t know how to do it. 

We started to list out the things we use and what data they're collecting, much of this may be anonymised, aggregated and not personally identifiable, some however is. 

Running Watch 

• Number of steps  
• Heart rate 
• Sleep patterns 
• VO2 Max (a guess) 

Website Data 

• Google searches 
• YouTube videos searched/watched 
• Facebook posts 
• Images uploaded 
• Twitter posts 
• LinkedIn activity 

Phone 

• Location data 
• Search history 
• Purchase history 
• App data 

Obviously not an exhaustive list but talking it through did raise a few questions about the use of the data. 

There’s obviously great potential to use this sort of data to provide personalised and tailored services outside of advertising. Garmin know how active I am, what activity I do and how much sleep I get. Useful info for a health or life insurance company to provide a more tailored service. Vitality already offer a health insurance product with rewards for being active or leading a healthy lifestyle.  

Location data collected on a phone is being used to pinpoint services – where to eat, offers based on where you are and where your taxi is for example. 

In talking this through we identified lots of positives but inevitably thoughts turned to the more paranoid – "what if, can they" scenarios.  

Two things jumped out, firstly a discussion on how data might be used in policing. Could for example, police forces start to predict crime based on activity or correlate individuals to crimes based on what they have historically done, where they’ve been, what they’ve said etc  

A couple of days later the Register published an article in which it explains Cardiff University have been awarded $800k by the US Department of Justice to develop a pre-crime detection system. The idea being to use social media data combined with police data to identify potential hate crime and deploy police ahead of time.   

Clearly the implementation of any predictive policing needs a lot of thought and oversight to avoid misuse and targeting of specific communities, groups of people or individuals but is an interesting use of data which is readily available.  

The second point concerned children. They have access to so much technology now, most games and sites they use capture some form of behavioural data. In some cases they have social media accounts from a very early age - not always legitimate but peer pressure plays a part here.

Earlier in the year four large toy manufacturers (Hasbro, Mattel, JumpStart Games and Viacom) were fined for letting online marketers track children's internet habits. The case in the USA followed a lengthy investigation in which it was found these companies used cookie data and ip addresses to track children, giving them access to some of their personal information, all without parental approval.

The volume of data being collected on future generations is likely to be far more over a lifetime, given the speed of services in the market and rate at which they're adopted. The potential for insight or inference is huge. At the moment it's unclear as to how all this is really going to be used and for some that is the problem.

It's inevitable that the volume of personal data being collected is going to increase. There's definitely a case for much more transparency in what's being collected, how it's being used and also the ability to check that history - particularly when this comes to children. At the moment it's all buried far too deep in the small print, it could easily be made much more explicit and up front.