Let not only the Lord Save The Queen (of bees) …together with our privacy

On Data Privacy Day (January 28), have you ever pondered if the decline of online privacy and the decline of the global bee population could have a common outcome, namely the end of human civilization as we know it? If not, then maybe it’s high time to connect the dots that seem unrelated at first glance.

For starters, bees are critical to safeguarding the global food supply by transporting pollen between flowers and crops, the activity known as pollination that enables fertilization and the production of plant seeds.

Bees are therefore responsible for producing many important crops that we, humankind, rely on as a food source.?

In short: no more bees means no more abundant food and the end of life as we know it, because all major food-crops that we rely on to survive, need to be pollinated by bees.

Bee pollination is important not only commercially but also ecologically. Except aquatic animals, almost every single species living on land, also depends on bees for their survival, because their plant-based food sources – nuts berries, seeds, and fruits – all rely on pollination. It also allows for plant growth, providing various animal species with habitats, including insects and birds. Lastly, both the bees themselves, and the honey they produce, are a source of nutrition.

Today there are some estimated 16,000 distinct bee species both wild and domesticated. Unfortunately, overall bee populations are now in marked decline everywhere on earth. Factors such as pests, diseases, moulds, viruses, habitat loss, excessive use of agrochemicals and agricultural monocultures each have their own detrimental effects on the health of bee populations worldwide. Over the last decade, multiple reports have indicated that beehives in the U.S. and Europe have suffered hive losses of at least 30%, sometimes higher.

As a result of the current decline in global wild bee populations, the value of pollination by commercially managed hives of honey bees has increased markedly. Every single worker-bee living in each of those hives has an average life span between six weeks in summer and six months during the rest of the year, with worker-bees being gender-neutral, neither male nor female. They are tireless super pollinators, benefiting all kinds of crop plants, including such staples as wheat and barley. In the United States, worker-bees are responsible pollinating more than 35% of agricultural production and almost ninety different commercially grown food crops.

Pollinators contribute $24 billion to the U.S. agriculture industry, making up a third of the food consumed by Americans.

The global food crop production, pollinated by bees, is currently valued at $577 billion. It is an important factor that helps feeding the global population of almost 8 billion people. In the coming 80 years until the year 2100, human population is expected to increase by 4 billion, until it peaks at around 12 billion people by the year 2100. By all means, this number is a mildly conservative estimate!

While human population increases, our friends the bees continue their largely man-made decline. This not only negatively influences global production of food crops, but also impacts on the affordability and availability of food for large segments of human society, as bee pollination is necessary for almost all important food crops.

Therefore, if we do not actively manage to reverse this trend in significant ways, then one needs not be a professional doomsday prophet to foresee what kind of fate will befall us by end of the century.

Now that we are a bit more aware that the humble bees are actually our best friends and crucial for guaranteeing that we can go on enjoying life as we know it, what about us constantly generating personal “data-honey” while buzzing around online in cyberspace. So, is this dreaded “death by squandered online data” something real?

The majority of our personal data is nowadays generated online in the realm of cyberspace on the internet. The ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT (OECD, a forum where governments work together to address the various challenges of globalization), defines the internet as “a fundamental infrastructure (...) to address a wide array of economic and social challenges. Its open and decentralised design means that this potential is accessible to all.”-

The internet has so far remained largely decentralized, and thankfully there is neither a “Queen-bee of the internet”, nor any almighty “Lord of cyberspace”.

In its December 2011 White Paper entitled: principles for internet policy making, the OECD explicitly stresses that the internet should, “enable people to give voice to their democratic aspirations and (…) any policy-making associated with it must promote openness and be grounded in respect for human rights and the rule of law”.?-

Moreover, “the strength and dynamism of the Internet depend on its ease of access through high speed networks, on openness, and on user confidence.”-

The internet in general (including the novel concept of the internet of things, IoT) can be described as a peculiar kind of electronic transportation infrastructure, with digital data being both its cargo and lifeblood. As users we are usually trustful that all cargo is arriving at its intended destination and that the flow of the lifeblood is not obstructed.

?As each and everyone of us is active on the internet, be it for work, necessity or pleasure, and ‘every-thing’ -or object- is also increasingly being interconnected via the IOT, colossal amounts of digital data are generated, conveyed and exchanged. Very few of the data is permanently lost or irrevoquably deleted on the net.

Even before the advent of the IOT, data has been generated by each and every one of us on a more or less continuous basis online, since the mid-1990s. However it has never been established or legally defined to whom all data belong.

The question is: Does it belong to every individual, or to corporations? Maybe to a government? Witness how China globally harvests all kinds of data in 2022. Or perhaps does it even belong to entire humankind at the same time? Sort of a global ‘data-commons’.

There is currently no definitive answer, because the ownership of data has so far never been regulated once and for all.

If we assume that digital data in cyberspace is part of the privacy sphere of every individual, then it should be protected by law and rightfully owned by each person who generates data. There have been well-intentioned attempts to achieve this, such as the 1981 EU Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, signed by the?Council of Europe?in January of that same year.

It is currently in the process of being updated to reflect new legal challenges caused by fast-changing technological development. The?Convention on Cybercrime?is also protecting the integrity of data systems and thus of privacy in cyberspace.

Privacy including data protection is also protected by?Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

To raise awareness among individual users, the public at large, Data Privacy Day has been established as an educational initiative with the aim of protecting the privacy of all personal information online, particularly in the context of?social networking.

The educational focus has expanded over the years to include families, consumers, and businesses. In addition to its educational initiative, Data Privacy Day promotes events and activities that stimulate the development of technology tools that promote individual control over?personally identifiable information; encourage compliance with?privacy laws?and regulations; and create dialogues among stakeholders interested in advancing data protection and privacy. The international celebration offers opportunities for collaboration among governments, industry, academia, non-profits, privacy professionals and educators.

It used to be that individual health data were the holy grail of privacy until the Covid-pandemic came along in 2020. Before that fateful year, health apps did exist already, but only select members of the medical profession, insurances, or algorithms active along your Apple watch were allowed glimpses.

Ironically now most of us are required by various laws and regulations to exhibit our most intimate health-data (proof of recuperation or vaccination) to anyone entitled to scrutinize them, which also includes waiters or shop clerks…. something which would have seemed entirely absurd if imagined before 2020.

Yet nowadays we not only have fully adapted to it, but we may even feel relieved when a clerk in a shop does not doubt the electronic QR-codes we present on our health documents, and graciously regards us being no “covert threat” to public health or to common wellbeing, because we can prove beyond reasonable doubt with our digital data that we are fully vaccinated.

Here the principle of Habeas corpus, or the judicial presumption of individual “innocence” (i.e. anybody is innocent until proven guilty), also seems to be in the process to being turned on its head, exactly as practiced for decades in dictatorships such as North Korea or China, where anyone is automatically “guilty until proven innocent” (and rehabilitated -if ever- not by the court system but by the “all-knowing” and “correct” communist party).

With the pandemic not yet fully tamed, let alone vanquished, the role of final arbiter and jury is assumed by virologists, epidemiologists and other national health professionals who often fail to agree on the most basic issues. All of which is however not entirely their fault, because scientists are supposed to prove valid scientific theories by mutually disputing and falsifying them.

As nobody seems to have any hard scientific proof on the origins of the SARS-Covid-2 virus (largely thanks to Chinese reluctance to share relevant and verified data with the international community) every professional is trying to prove his or her own unique theory. So, a technical difficulty remains before someone is being “proven innocent,” or in medical terms: non-infectious and fully immune against any current and future variant of the virus. This is also what is behind the ‘false-positives’ or ‘being asymptomatic.’ The general confusion on the efficiency of vaccines protecting against infections by the Omicron and the Delta variants, is another symptom.

Furthermore, during the pandemic, everyone seems to have been “presumed guilty” (being a potential carrier of dangerous viruses), until being proven “innocent” by elaborate digital health certificates that are linked to our ID documents. Unsurprisingly all those are usually verified and stored online, via QR-codes.

All of which open the gates to casual abuse and fraud, if not properly secured by persons who are now required by law of handling and collecting them. In this context, various cases have surfaced recently of stalking pub managers, being tasked to verify, and collect digital health data of their customers, making unwanted advances towards unwitting female customers.

In addition to losing control over who can legally have access to health data, as this stalking case demonstrates, we also seem to have lost control over our “Corpus” (as in physical body), because we can never be entirely sure that it has not suddenly morphed into a potential vector of dangerous viruses, propagating the pandemic with more or less serious consequences.

Gone are the days of the pre-pandemic era, when a “vulgar” cold would not prevent one from going to work. Being able to nonchalantly dismiss, without relying on digital documents, that one could be the potential source of a serious respiratory disease among co-workers.

In the post pandemic era things have sometimes changed beyond recognition and every single online user, generating digital data, is even ever more vulnerable and less secure in multiple respects.

Stringent and effective regulations are indeed needed for better protection of sensitive personal data; unfortunately, current regulations only cover business entities and corporate stakeholders and neglect individual users.

Yet is this latter group for which data security is an even more priceless good. Any private individual who has been the unfortunate victim of identity theft or access-denial to crucial data via hacking, during in the last 30 years, knows this from painful experience.

If this happens systematically on a large scale, then entire segments of society, who are reliant on functioning multiple infrastructures (transportation, traffic, water, electricity, banking, healthcare, etc.) can be gravely affected. In a worst-case anarchy and civil war can quickly ensue, especially if a malignant political power or rogue dictatorial government coordinates such attacks.

The historian Yuval Noah Harari is one of the first modern thinkers who has conjured a disturbing vision of a dystopian future that he called “digital dictatorship”. In its most extreme form, he defines it as a non-democratic form of government that owns and controls all electronic data ever generated, no matter the location.

Such a government would thus gain universal sovereignty over all data via manipulation or theft and deprive any foreign government, corporation and individual on its target list of his or her private data. Such a digital dictatorship on an imperialist invasion-spree could very well bring down another country entirely without needing to invade it militarily and firing a shot in anger.

Currently, China is the only country that is the most advanced on the long way to digital dictatorship. In February 2021, during the widespread demonstrations for democracy and against military rule after a coup in neighboring Myanmar, China did use its data know-how and digital supremacy to control the Myanmar cyberspace and telecommunications on behalf of Myanmar’s illegal military government, which lacked such technology and know-how. The move was a success, helping the junta to identify a large number of demonstrators who were then either imprisoned without trial, tortured, or killed.

?Beside a few aspiring digital dictatorships, there are large global corporations located in the USA, China, Japan, and South-Korea, behaving a bit like monopolists who manage, distribute, and collect large amounts of data from individuals and businesses alike. They seem to act in similar ways as the East India Company, gaining political power by administering colonies on behalf of the Crown (e.g. India).

The question arises, who has provided all data largely for free, authorizing them by default to monetize, commercialize and analyze it as they please? Well, mainly we ourselves, due to our largely disinterested cavalier attitude relating to digital data. We however should never let neither totalitarian dictatorships nor 21st century versions of the East India Company be able to dictate what remains of our inalienable right to privacy.

Now what has the ‘Lord in Heaven’ to do with all of that? Why should He be implored with saving?bees together with our privacy, when it is the sole responsibility of every one of us to do just that all by ourselves and for our sake.

Even if everyday cannot be Christmas, every day should be Data Privacy day from now on. In an age where people are increasingly agnostic or atheist, the ancient Greek adage holds true that, “God (or any other supreme spiritual being) helps those who help themselves.” This should be inspiration enough for each and every one of us by raising awareness for Data Privacy Day and for taking better care of our personal data and related security in cyberspace.

Authors: Susan Brown - Founder of Zortrex - [email protected] and I.F.

#privacy #dataprotection #datasecurity #future #money #computersoftware