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: 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 THIS IS IMPORTANT

Big brother is watching and when it does you can gain tremendous insights into the behaviour of humans. I zoomed in on Montreal and the diagram is very clear about which run trails are most popular on the Mount Royal. On the dark side, of course, this means Strava performs some high level surveillance on us as we share our bike and run rides with their software.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

More insights on wellness and fitness from social media and big data. Here what is important to note is how we can extract knowledge from information that people share on social media. With more and more wearable devices and internet connected devices like refrigerators, cooktops, and water bottles, it is clear that more and more insight will be gathered from our digital exhaust.

More insights:

- more on the digital twin and digital exhaust: fmcs.digital/blog/digital-twin 

- the website with all the data: panometer.org/instruments/lexicocalorimeter 

- twitter can also help predict happiness: hedonometer.org/index.html 

- the research paper: arxiv.org/pdf/1507.05098.pdf 

- lapresse+ article (in french): plus.lapresse.ca/screens/d09ef280-9b06-4fe5-935c-4155336ef100%7C_0.html 

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Wearing a device such as a fitbit does something way bigger than providing you with insights: it provides a HUGE trove of data to be mined for trends and insights. I wrote about the jawbone big data analysis in the past, but recently found that fitbit has started to provide a similar service, analyzing data its millions of devices capture every day.

More insights:

www.fitbit.com/fitscience

fmcs.digital/?s=jawbone 

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Expect to hear more about security threats and fears in the coming years. In the digital world, I suggest that there is a "hierarchy of digital needs" (see the pyramid of digital needs fmcs.digital/blog/pyramid-of-digital-needs/) and that if we do not feel secure in the digital world, we will not be able to leverage the different tools and solutions available to us. In fact, the research shows that our fears are exacerbated when we are not in control, which is the case for most people as they do not fully understand digital technologies (layer 1 in the pyramid) and do not feel secure (layer 2).

"...many things affect how we perceive risk:

• do you trust the person you are dealing with
• control vs. lack of control (lack of control inflates risk perceptions)
• is it catastrophic or chronic (catastrophic inflates risk perceptions)
• does it incite dread or anger (dread inflates risk perceptions)
• uncertainty (lack of knowledge about something inflates risk perceptions)

“Most people do not distinguish well between a one-in-a-thousand risk and a one-in-a-million risk,” said Mark Egan, an associate advisor at the Behavioral Insights Group in London.

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...