WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: the future of privacy will be determined by Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Baidu, etc. This article and others from the NYT dossier on privacy are must read to understand what privacy will mean in the future. Certainly not the "anonymity" that you have been told since childhood...

WHY IT MATTERS: China is using facial recognition to monitor its citizens, this is a well documented fact. Unfortunately, not all the steps required to protect this very private information are being taken, as evidenced by this article. This raises again the importance of security to be built into our every activities, especially those that involve government or security activities.

WHY IT MATTERS: trust on the Internet is difficult to get. Harvard Business Review raises concerns and provides possible solutions in this special series. Much needed, the solutions do not however appear very easy to implement. Tough times ahead for the truth...

WHY IT MATTERS: read this very detailed report that explains how political parties have used the Facebook data to create personalized messages and influence the election that led to the Brexit. Fascinating. Also read my posts on the data you leave behind - the data exhaust - that enables the creation of your digital twin: http://fmcs.digital/blog/digital-twin 

WHY IT MATTERS: this report from the ICO data privacy organization in the UK explains in their recent report how political parties and companies use your private data to create a digital twin profile to then target you during your Internet journeys with micro-targeted messages. Also read my post on the digital twin concept: http://fmcs.digital/blog/digital-twin 

WHY IT MATTERS: data that you post on Facebook or elsewhere is aggregated by political parties and retailers and governments and others to create a virtual profile of yourself - what I call the digital twin. See my post here for more on the digital twin: http://fmcs.digital/blog/digital-twin/ 

WHY IT MATTERS: this investigation on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows how much data is being collected by political parties.

WHY IT MATTERS: ICO is the data protection organization in the UK. It provides a guide to your rights regarding data and privacy. Very useful and well done.

WHY IT MATTERS: this well researched article with many links will provide hours of content to help you understand the Facebook breach. The data may surprise you both by the high accuracy that some predictive models have, and by the relatively low accuracy of other elements.

WHY IT MATTERS: Big data and Internet of things - where every device in the world is connected - has huge potential. At the same time, this enhanced traceability has downsides for privacy and security, as evidenced by this article from The Guardian. Other similar examples in the past have highlighted the possible issues: robbers get caught by police when the photos they post of their robbery includes their GPS location, or face identification cameras in China let government track individuals as they walk the street. We will have to find a solution for this in the future.

Other articles I wrote about the strava Big Data visualization are here:

2017 dataset: http://fmcs.digital/blog/where-people-go-to-play-strava-global-heatmap-aggregates-1b-activities-and-13t-data-points-to-show-where-people-run-bike-in-the-world-bigdata-maps/ 

2015 dataset: http://fmcs.digital/blog/strava-170m-ridesruns-heatmap-shows-most-popular-bike-run-trails-of-2015-with-bigdata-gps-crowdsourcing/ 

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

To be in full control of our private information may be the holly grail of the Internet today. This new technology appears to solve the problem and provide a solution for all of us. For the moment in trial for developers, I can't wait to try it out....

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

We are just starting to scratch the surface of what we can learn when we analyze the personal data from social media. When everything is connected with Internet of things products and when we measure everything we do using wearables and quantified-self technologies, the insights will be even greater. Companies should prepare to analyze this massive data rush and us all should start to think about our information privacy more carefully...

As they say, this solution is both brilliant and scary. It speaks to the power of using mobile phones, geolocation and big data.