Digital Privacy and the Right to be Protected

Where do we go from here? It seems the future of digital privacy is going to be even more evasive because of our current social construct. We live in a “fine divide” a term coined to describe the actions of consumers who are willing to succumb to balancing their desire for personalized experiences with the very plausible guilt that their data may be mishandled. Such guilt and fear are warranted especially with the recent social media scandals as described above. Though privacy has become such a divisive topic, the decisions about our digital privacy is greatly necessary.

Unfortunately, one can only do so much to establish their personal privacy, because this goes in tandem with transparency especially from the same companies who are abusing it. The reality is that companies are also looking at the latest gold mine of business because of the advent of big data and other data-driven technologies.

During a recent study by a salesforce research report from a double-blind survey conducted between March 26, 2018 through April 12 2018.

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They generated responses from 6,723 individuals in14 countries, including the United States. Showed that customers’ felt vulnerable and wary of the intentions of many companies. According to the research pol 59% of customers believe that their personal information is vulnerable to the security of a kind while 54% did not believed that companies have their best interests at heart.

Fig x State of the Connected Customer survey, Salesforce Research, April 2018

Such qualitative data trumps what companies seem to project and portray. A recent attempt by Mark Zuckerberg to discuss Facebooks commitment to privacy, by reducing the permanence of information that the company collects was widely viewed as a lame attempt at correcting an image deeply ingrained in the public.

Such contrasting views result from the fact that the public can see through their phony dedication to the subject at hand.

But not all companies are like Facebook. Especially with the advent of GDPR there are some who are stepping up to inform and empower their customers by providing transparency and protections for customer data. Such corporations tends to use it to curate brand loyalty and brand differentiation. The flaw with this approach is that public perceptions does not exist in silos, thereby prompting a fundamental change in consumer perception before such silo approach will work.

The proposed consumer trust model

There are basic antecedents to the consumer trust model above and to persuade consumers across this bridge, it is vital to understand the influential stimulants for this trust. According to W. Z. Khan and co. Security is the most important factor when it comes to gaining consumer trust. As an example, Security requirements for IoT applications can be grouped into four categories: device-level security, application-level security, data security, and communication security. This type of security must take into consideration the availability in terms of survivability of consumer data in case of an attack. Confidentiality, the degree to which sensitive data can be viewed and accessed only by authorized personnel. Data integrity, the degree to which data is ensured to be unaltered either intentionally or unintentionally. A further privacy proposal by W. Z. Khan and co is shown in the chart below.

Privacy requirements at different stages of a smart object working hierarchy

It’s clear that privacy going into the future hinge on cardinal beams one being security and another being transparency. Secondly, there are so many bridges to cross and one would ask, can technology solve our personal privacy issue? We have solved so many issues and maybe this is no different. One miracle technology that currently seems like a mirage offers an innovative approach to storing information, executing transactions, performing functions, and establishing trust in an open and transparent environment. Blockchain is a novel way to construct fully distributed systems and has the potential to disrupt many businesses including Uber and Airbnb within the sharing economy according to Lei Xu and Co. So many consider blockchain a breakthrough for cryptography and cybersecurity, with a myriad of use cases ranging from globally deployed cryptocurrency systems like Bitcoin to smart contracts, smart grids over the Internet of Things, and many more. Yes it’s pretty obvious that blockchain can solve our problem despite its flaws though few, maybe this could be the push required to make it mainstream.

W. Z. Khan, M. Y. Aalsalem, M. K. Khan and Q. Arshad, "Data and Privacy: Getting Consumers to Trust Products Enabled by the Internet of Things," in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 35-38, March 2019.
doi: 10.1109/MCE.2018.2880807

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8635000&isnumber=8634953

Lei Xu, Nolan Shah, Lin Chen, Nour Diallo, Zhimin Gao, Yang Lu, and Weidong Shi. 2017. Enabling the Sharing Economy: Privacy Respecting Contract based on Public Blockchain. In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (BCC '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15-21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3055518.3055527