Privacy is inversely proportional to data collected
We have become a data driven economy with a massive thirst for granular data points, enabling technology and business to accelerate. Data is collected and collated in the cloud via privacy notices that consumers never read; and definitely without consumers knowing who is seeing their data or how it is being shared.
A look at the article by Bernard Marr makes your mind numb with the scale of data collection. And every indication suggests data collection is growing at exponential rates—in the last two years alone we doubled the data we have collected.
All of this data collection has left us with unintended consequences to our society, where large tech companies, political parties, and cyber villain’s gain access and use our own data against us. The volume of personal data collected will continue to make our privacy vulnerable; until we make needed changes.
“WITHOUT PRIVACY THERE WAS NO POINT IN BEING AN INDIVIDUAL” Jonathan Franzen
Privacy invasion continues; but change is coming..
Most of us became familiarized with the notion of privacy laws when the GDPR started to show up in our news feeds in 2017. Since then, the topic has received more attention with the sheer volume of breaches; most U.S. consumers have been impacted by a breach themselves. Consumers are now more aware of the challenges digital data collection creates than ever before.
Consumer Rights Advocates and lawmakers around the world have been listening to their constituents and have responded. We started with GDPR in 2018, and now CCPA coming up in 2020—We anticipate most states worldwide to have implemented privacy policies in the next decade.
In the first six months of 2019, companies under scrutiny from privacy protection laws were breached at unprecedented rates. The financial punishments meted out are not yet serving as an effective deterrent. Thanks to Facebook, we are well aware that cash rich companies continue to invade our lives without really paying a price.
According to the SecurityMagazine, 78% consumers would leave a brand that had a data breach, and about 50% won’t trust any brand that has had one.
Change is coming and brands know there are consequences for being consumer privacy ignorant; if we continue to allow enterprises that will scavenge any data that is available for their survival, we will continue to fall prey to our privacy being traded on the street for pennies to the dollar.
Privacy is a product category
Loving Apple’s new privacy site? When the #1 brand in the world drives privacy as the core message and future product while enforcing the change to others in the ecosystem including big tech like Google and Facebook, privacy as a product has already taken off. Apple is spending billions in marketing privacy globally providing needed visibility.
The notion of privacy as a product has taken root and it only makes sense.
Your Smartphone has muscle!
Smartphones carry our most private data. The technological advances smartphones have made in terms of computing power, battery life, and memory storage may be the key to keeping things private. It’s right there, in our hands!
Take the Samsung S10 device for instance—this is a premium device today and the default specification for every smartphone in the coming years. Even the cheaper S10e device has storage and computing power to process user input and providing answers immediately while keeping privacy intact, and potentially reducing costs in terms of network costs, and cloud computing.
Smartphone computing power provides the doorway to the next technology revolution. Computing user input at the smartphone edge is private by design.
Privacy and Edge based apps are thriving!
Apple is making significant privacy oriented changes for their devices and their applications on all of their hardware. From ensuring Safari browser prevents cross site tracking and obfuscating user-id from maps to enabling ML at the edge for Siri, Apple is already enabling the first set of privacy and computing changes on device and in native applications. Servers in the cloud see obfuscated data, and most of it is risk-less while providing the same or better quality services to the user.
Privacy-first companies like Brave are leading the edge based computing use case by blocking trackers on the browser itself making browsing faster, less intrusive, causing low network overhead, and improving battery life. Brave provides client based ad serving and client based ML that hyper-targets users on the browser without sending user specific data.
Companies providing privacy by design software are not just providing privacy as a product or feature, they are also showcasing the benefits of client and edge based computing by improving benefits to the end consumer.
Apple launched client based software that enables in-app machine learning readily available for smartphone developers to collocate ML to where their application runs. So the commingled future of privacy and edge based computing is already here and will only grow from here.
Blotout: What happens on the device stays on the device
Blotout is in stealth mode!
We are laying the foundation of a privacy by design, edge based computing future driven for smart devices and smart device applications. Our primary goal is to enable an in-app technology stack that allows smartphone app developers to provide privacy for their consumers without losing user fidelity, retention, or features!
Follow us here for updates! Thank you for listening.
The Blotout team.