{"id":2610,"date":"2015-01-26T08:24:16","date_gmt":"2015-01-25T21:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=2610"},"modified":"2015-01-26T08:24:16","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T21:24:16","slug":"creepy-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.panicola.com\/?p=2610","title":{"rendered":"Creepy data"},"content":{"rendered":"

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http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2014\/dec\/05\/when-data-gets-creepy-secrets-were-giving-away<\/p>\n

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When data gets creepy: the secrets we don\u2019t realise we\u2019re giving away<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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We all worry about digital spies stealing our data \u2013 but now even the things we thought we were happy to share are being used in ways we don\u2019t like. Why aren\u2019t we making more of a fuss?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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\"ben<\/div>
We have few sound intuitions into what is safe and what is flimsy when it comes to securing our digital lives \u2013 let alone what is ethical and what is creepy. Photograph: Darrel Rees\/Heart Agency for the Guardian<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\"Ben<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Ben Goldacre<\/a><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s easy to be worried about people simply spying on your confidential data. iCloud and Google+ have your intimate photos; Transport for London knows where your travelcard has been; Yahoo holds every email you\u2019ve ever written. We trust these people to respect our privacy, and to be secure. Often they\u00a0fail: celebrity photos are stolen<\/a>; emails are shared with spies<\/a>; the confessional app Whisper is caught tracking the location of users<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But these are straightforward failures of security. At the same time, something much more interesting has been happening. Information we have happily shared in\u00a0public is increasingly being used in ways that make us queasy, because our intuitions about security and privacy have failed to keep up with technology. Nuggets of personal information that seem trivial, individually, can now be aggregated, indexed and processed. When this happens, simple pieces of computer code can produce insights and intrusions that creep us out, or even do us harm. But most of us haven\u2019t noticed yet: for a lack of nerd skills, we are exposing ourselves.<\/p>\n

At the simplest level, even the act of putting lots of data in one place \u2013 and making it searchable \u2013 can change its accessibility. As a doctor, I have been to\u00a0the house ofa newspaper hoarder<\/a>; as\u00a0a\u00a0researcher, I have been to the British\u00a0Library newspaper<\/a> archive. The\u00a0difference between the two is not the amount of information, but rather the index. I recently found myself in the quiet coach on a train, near a stranger shouting into her phone. Between London and York she shared her (unusual) name, her plan to move jobs, her plan to steal a client list, and her wish that she\u2019d snogged her boss. Her entire sense of privacy was predicated on an outdated model: none of what she\u00a0said had any special interest to the people in coach H. One tweet with her name in would have changed that, and been searchable for ever.<\/p>\n

An interesting side-effect of public data being indexed and searchable is that you only have to be sloppy once, for\u00a0your privacy to be compromised. The computer program Creepy<\/a> makes good fodder for panic. Put in someone\u2019s username from Twitter, or Flickr, and Creepy will churn through every photo hosting service it knows, trying to find every picture they\u2019ve ever posted. Cameras \u2013 especially phone cameras \u2013 often store the location where the picture was taken in the picture data. Creepy grabs all this geo-location data and puts pins on a map for you. Most of the time, you probably remember to get the privacy settings right. But if you get it wrong just once \u2013 maybe the first time you used a new app, maybe before your friend showed you how to change the settings \u2013 Creepy will find it, and your home is marked on a map. All because you tweeted a photo of something funny your cat did, in your kitchen.<\/p>\n

\"medical<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n
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