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This is the age of information, and data is the fuel that drives the information age. Data is growing in the internet every minute. Each one of us is contributing to it when we share our information in return of services. Services like communication through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. We share with Uber, Ola, etc for a discounted city ride, we share with Amazon, Flipkart, Alibaba for discounted products, to name a few.
Data comes from consumers communicating with consumers, consumers communicating with business, businesses communicating to other businesses, users communicating with machines, and machines communicating with machines.
The data is growing in the internet because internet forgets nothing. Even after we delete some of our data we published in the internet, traces of it remains in one server or the other. None of us have control over it, once it is published.
Data is driver in the age of information the way land was in the agriculture, or iron was in the age of industries. Today’s economy is a data driven economy. Data is the raw material for many in this age of information. Data is bought and sold at an unimaginable rate.
Data is multiplying every year at a rapid speed. Each one of us are contributing to it. An estimation in 2021 shows that there was 74 Zettabytes of data in the digital universe, and this data is increasing at a rate of about 40% every year. The cause behind this growth is that ‘Internet forgets nothing’. At this rate, we will have about 149 Zettabytes of data in the digital universe by the end of 2024. 1 Zettabyte=1021 byte or 1012 GB (1,00,00,00,00,00,000GB 10 lakh crore GB)
Now, the bulging size of data is not as much a concern as the security of it is. There are people who are trying to get your data or information to sell in the market, and there are those willing to buy it. Cost does not matter. Pentagon alone reports about 10 million hacking attempts to their servers every day. They try to hack the servers in order to get data out of it. Data is of utmost importance for some, while for others it is a commodity which they steal from one place and sell to the other.
So, why do they need the data? There are some vendors who use this data to provide better services to their customer, or prospects. There are various reasons that we share our data in the expectation of getting better services. We share almost everything on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. These are the known sources of data for many. There are even more sources which we hardly consider as the sources of data for others. They take our data in return of services, e.g., Uber, YouTube, Amazon, Flipkart, Alibaba, Snapdeal, etc. We hardly think twice before sharing our personal data with these service providers. All these service providers use our data to help us and to offer better services as per our interest, taste, localization, to suite our behaviours, etc. They never intend to use our data for any wrong purposes.
But at the same time, there are some people whose profession is to sell data. They take all possible steps to obtain our data from all these sources and maximize profits for themselves. While sharing our personal data, we never realize how dangerous can be the results once our personal data goes out, and falls into the wrong hands. Cybercrime costs over 400 billion US$ every year, and this amount is increasing by 200% every 5 years. Some of these thefts of data were made public in order to make the users aware of the situation, and many others are not made public for various reasons. One such reason could be that most of us would not like to do business with a company which compromises your data.
Of course, we can secure our data using encryption. Data on Oracle cloud can be encrypted to ensure maximum security.
Coming up shortly how to protect your data. Till that time, please be careful what you share and where do you share it, because the “Internet forgets nothing”, and that there are wolves waiting out there to sell your data.
(inspired by a Ted Talk by Mark Hurd, Former CEO of Oracle Corporation)
Published in LInkedIn
Coming up soon how and where do the spammers get your personal data