Most people do not realise how many organisations are
collecting their "digital footprints" as they roam the internet and
communicate with their friends, so data mining expertDeticais to commission a national survey on the public's changing
perceptions of privacy and its limits.
Announcing the study, the head of Detica's technical consulting
practice, Anthony Golledge, told Computer Weekly that technology
was changing so fast that most people were not aware of how many
"digital footprints" they leave as they surf the internet, travel
and use their mobile phones.
This is especially the case with smartphones, which give
outsiders much greater insight into their owners' lives because of
all the things they do with them, said Golledge.
A PoliticsHone
survey this month found that 63% of Britons feel the government
already collects too much information about them, and only one in
four favours data collection and retention by the authorities.
Golledge said many organisations are collecting users' data.
Some are using it for legitimate purposes, such as law enforcement
and national security or to target advertising, but others are less
scrupulous.
Golledge said data mining applications are pushing technology
limits. With the number of online transactions growing daily, so
much data is generated each day that brute force attempts to
identify individuals from the bitstream are unlikely to succeed, he
said.
"We need to return to an older strategy, which is to generate a
reasonable working hypothesis and test the data against that to
find fits," he said.
Golledge said trying to identify individuals using "brute force"
was like looking for a needle in a haystack when even the needles
looked like hay. "We are at the point when data mining and
behaviour targeting are good for identifying classes or short lists
of people, but the searcher must use other methods to corroborate
the findings and narrow the field further to get to the
individual," he said.
Golledge said few people are aware of the data trail left by
their use of mobile phones, particularly with respect to location
data. "Very few people know that an entire journey can be traced
from the log of mobile base stations that pick up the signal from
their phone," he said.
Such information is not worth much on its own, but over time it
can enable an organisation to build up a detailed picture of the
phone owner's movement patterns. Allied to that are calls that they
make and receive. This makes it easy to uncover a subject's social
network, said Golledge.
"This information is probably even more interesting to
investigators and marketers than your name and address," he
said.
Golledge said the survey would "take the temperature" of public
attitudes to privacy issues over time. Detica expects the results
to inform government and large businesses' decision about
appropriate steps to take with respect to privacy.