Cyber Privacy, Who Has Your Data and Why You Should Care, by April Falcon Doss, BenBella Books 2021

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.  If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.  Lao Tzu, The Art of War.

It's a question we've all awakened to  - who has your data, and what the heck are they doing with it?  And why can't I have that money?  Ha!  Simple questions, complex answers, mostly comes down to the money. There may be laws - intellectual property, privacy, national defense - limiting our exposure, but the technology, even limited, is powerful and capable of faster than a speeding bullet change.  Faster than most of us have time to track it.  But here goes.

Author April Falcon Doss lays a tough challenge ahead of us.  She says that data in all its forms is not necessarily our enemy.  But by understanding data - like dissecting Covid-19 - we won't necessarily overcome its risks to our privacy, our individuality or our autonomy.  The problem is bigger than coming to a personal "do not do this ever" list.  Instead, the author warns us that we must be able to take a wider view and develop the ability to answer questions about how data, a continually growing and changing organism, will be used to feed our human drive for power, wealth, social biases. We are, she believes, quite a distance from mastering these challenges.

Think of the children, the children

Chapter 10,"Data-driven Privacy Disorder?, or how data collection and algorithms are being used in education, and what that means for our kids" is an eye-opener because it illustrates the very strong influence of the two biggies, Google and Amazon, on education.  When educational institutions require students to sign on, i.e. adhere to specific commercial computer protocols like Chrome or Google's Cloud, they are in effect signing into a tech supplier that can access the student's personal  communications and content creation; like any other "public" mass storage protocol, that data can then be stored, analyzed and perhaps even massaged for purposes never intended or even dreamed of by the original user.  You may say that this is the obvious and accepted risk inherent in any use of social media and The Cloud, but Doss and many other technologists are reluctant to accept the implications of this information use.  

Doss does a great job of taking us into areas that have become anxiety-producing - AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning -  both of which have come of age before we were quite ready to understand their power and reach.  And she wants us to stay uncomfortable with the imbalance between technology's fast growth and government/legal protections and policies.  She challenges us to re-think the issue of personal and data privacy.  At the same time, the use of Big Data and simple aggregation can offer us the kind of perspective on movements, health, human engineering that could continue to be of great value without an inherent loss of personal privacy and freedom.  She leaves us with this scary dichotomy as she challenges us to move faster on the policy end, to think through how far and deep we want to go.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com