Data Footprint - Missed Wake up Call?

I have been seeing the news and the recent happenings around the world on the different data leaks and wiki leaks. I tried to pen down my thoughts on the same and thus these are my personal opinions only.

We seem shocked about the data being sold or the data being shared to other people. I do not understand why suddenly we have had a wake up call. Did we miss all the signals from past lot of decades that we feel shocked by these happenings?

Let me clarify further -

We have been leaving digital footprint right from the time internet was born and credit cards have been put into use. We have allowed governments and other agencies to share and look at our credit card purchases for a very long time now. I mean if I use my credit card to buy a large cheese pizza someone knows about it. If I bought gas on the way home using my credit card. Everyone knows about it. Even for renting out a place, we had shared credit history and developed a credit score. How did we think this scoring was happening or did we really think no one was sharing the information?

We have been leaving a digital trial and footprint for a long time now. Thus the governments have become well equipped to safeguard as well as look into anyone's life at any point in the name of national security. We have allowed our conversations to customer care to be recorded without second thought. Those are used for training purposes. Why to that extent, If I browse through the net for a topic today let us say really personal, I would see popups, mails, snippets, links in every page then on that topic. Sometimes it gets embarrassing when someone else is using your machine.

End of the day - We leave data all around, we unknowingly have given permission for them to use it as they want. Phone numbers are sold as databases to various marketing agencies and rotated like library books. Our browsing history is sold to different retailers and other consumers so that they can do target marketing and tap into potential leads. We do seem fine and happy if our bank proactively gives us discounts and talks to us about future needs but why are we upset that they know "we need that". Obviously they did analysis on the data history and your behavior past many years collected via all these digital sources. The trend is figured out and you are put into even a segment for them to target your needs better.

We give permissions all across to different people everyday to access our data.

Facebook and Other social media - we proactively put up what we ate today, what is our mood today and what is my gps right now. I always felt sometimes "Why do I want to know where you are right now!! or what you ate for lunch!!". But we do enjoy being social and putting all our personal lives there. It is digital footprint to say the least. We want to share, We want to connect. Then our data is obviously out there for world to see.

Information is power. Few months back almost an year I think, I was thinking and also heard that the most powerful man in this world right now is CEO of the social media leader. Why? He has the data. Data and Information is Power in this world. Using data our economists could predict boom and slumps, countries trade based on data, our whole economy sits on top of historic data and the data trends. So if you have the information of such powerful nature. It comes with a great responsibility to use it for good.

Some high security agencies use cctv cameras to study the potential hazards, persons of interest in airports, potential threats, emergency situations as well. How do they arrive that data? They have historic data on which analytical models are run and the results allow the machines to build inferences which can be then used by different consumers. Even the facial expressions are stored, studied, analyzed for being used in security purposes like interrogations and to find out the distress signals, lies etc., Micro-expressions as these are called are results of detailed analytics on the huge data set of human expressions. Where would they get these apart from volunteer research work in universities. They procure from data sources in real time world.

Even from the ordinary github to quora or stackoverflow, we have ranked good contributors as influencers. So, it follows that in any digital arena where humans interact and share data, there are some people who are influencers and can influence others into following a particular trend or doing a particular task. Social media is a platform for mass influence or to be harsh - mass-hypnotism. Any thing that can have power at such a mass-level needs proper measures in place to prevent wrong from happening that will lead to harming the humanity. As I said, the folks who own the data have a great responsibility that comes with power.

We seem worried about one, I was more worried about Google as well. Google is tied to almost every transaction I do, every account I hold, and with smartphones, even my contact list is coupled with my google account. That feels scary too. But we are there, we need some account to tie it all up. No matter how secure it is, some where if we had by mistake unchecked or checked the "terms and conditions", there is always a chance of a fine print informing us the data will be used for some purpose.

It is not all bad, we have lot of good uses for such data procured at mass levels. We need data to help us study various diseases and conditions to figure out the medicines and what was the progress.

Either we should go back to using pen and paper, or learn to live with some of these as other side of coin. The leaders who hold these data, I stress again, have a great responsibility towards humanity and world peace.