Reflection: Leaks, Data Leaks

Enough about out project. Let's talk about something else.

 What do you think about when you hear the words “data leak”? For me personally, controversial hacks
to famous social networks and online stores come to mind. But that’s the thing, that’s not the only data
you should be worried about leaking... there’s a lot more information about you out there than you know.
There’s a lot more research going into this than you think, too. One’s presence on the Internet, trace,
contributions and records can be called our Digital Footprint. For you to be reading this, you must
certainly have one too. For an increasing majority (me included), this footprint extends way beyond
our awareness, spreading far beyond boundaries with (or without) intention.
This footprint is commonly broken down into active and passive traces, data exhaust is part of the
latter. Rather than being data that people consciously create, it’s data that people unintentionally
generate, unaware that it results as a byproduct of people’s online choices and interactions.
Some examples of this are cookies generated by web browsers and plugins, log files, temporary files,
etc.
This all comes as an interesting conflict between marketing and privacy/security, naturally. The main
objective of all this data exhaust is to identify a subject across different services and model their
behavior/tastes. This information is used for most free services (just think, what isn’t free nowadays?)
to show you the best possible product suggestions or such and such. Problem is, software designed
to be private and secure often disrupts online marketing and business models.
In 2017, Facebook allegedly told advertisers that they could predict when users were geeling
“insecure” or in need of a “confidence boost”. As this article mentions, the worrying thing is that few
people posting photos on Instagram area aware that they might be revealing their mental health status
to anyone with the right power.

The good things is, at the end of the day, a lot of it it's under our control. If we are careful about our
active digital footprint, our passive digital footprint becomes less of an issue. Just think about it, do I
really need to scrap the whole Internet for the latest gossip and memes at 2:00am?

Sources
Rouse, M. data exhaust. WhatIs. Recuperado de https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/data-exhaust
Tufecki, Z. (21 de abril de 2019). Think You’re Discreet Online? Think Again. The New York Times. Recuperado de https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/opinion/computational-inference.html

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