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The Guardian view on internet privacy: The ease with which giant databases can be examined and cross-referenced makes privacy vanish on the internet
February 8, 2018
Privacy is necessary for human society to function. The problem is not that the information ∃ but that it reaches the wrong people. Information on the internet could bring great benefits to society, and to individuals, when huge datasets can be refined to deliver information otherwise unavailable. But once the information is gathered, a precautionary principle has to apply.
Governments need to keep our trust; but technology erodes privacy in two ways. The first is simply smartphones. Most Britons – 70% – now carry around with them devices which record and report their location, their friends and their interests all the time. The second is the ease with which two (or more) datasets can be combined to bring out secrets that are apparent in neither set on its own, and to identify individuals from data that appears to be entirely anonymised. By the beginning of this century researchers had established
that nearly 90% of the US population could be uniquely identified simply by combining their gender, their date of birth and their postal code. All kinds of things can be reliably inferred from freely available data: four likes on Facebook are usually enough to reveal a person’s sexual orientation.
Underlying such problems is human psychology. No one forces anybody to reveal their preferences on Facebook: the like button is genuinely popular. The latest spectacular breach of privacy came when the exercise app Strava published a global map of the 3 trillion data location points its users had uploaded, which turned out to reveal the location of previously secret US military bases around the world. But the chance to boast about where you have been and how fast you were
moving is exactly what makes Strava popular. Psychology, as much as technology, made this a massive security breach. The users gave enthusiastic consents, but they were fantastically ill-informed. Then again, how could anyone give informed consent when not even the firms that collect data sets can know how they will be used?
(www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2018/feb/08/the-guardianview- on-internet-privacy-its-the-psychology-stupid. Adaptado)
No trecho do terceiro parágrafo “not even the firms that collect the data sets can know how they will be used?”, o termo em destaque refere-se a
