How much is our data worth and what do Cloud Providers have to do with it?
It was the guru of social networks, the most famous student of the third millennium, the one who changed the relationships of many forever who said: “
For my generation, privacy is no longer a value
“.
It was 2010, eight years ago, which in technology are almost geological eras, with the usual distracted air Mark Zuckerberg in an interview was talking about privacy. “Six years ago, no one wanted their personal information to be on the web, but today the number of people who make their mobile phone available on Facebook is staggering.” What happened? It’s simple, the world has changed, and in this new, lascivious and uninhibited era, data is a very valuable commodity.
And a few years ago, the Financial Times, one of the world’s leading economic and financial newspapers, told us how much our data is worth, published a calculator that allowed users to discover the commercial value of their personal data. Making a rough estimate on an average user, the price would be around $0.6851. As a result, if a company wanted to buy the data of 10,000 similar people, the cost would be about $5,000. The variables that determine this price are age, gender, ethnicity, and level of education. And on the other side of the world, the Wall Street Journal also did two calculations: each of us would be worth $80.95 for Facebook, our friends $0.72 , and our full page almost $1,800.
It is no coincidence, in fact, that the biggest political-technological scandal of recent times concerns data. On March 18, in fact, two parallel investigations by the Guardian and the New York Times put Facebook at the center of one of the biggest media storms in its history: Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm, allegedly illegally used the data of more than 50 million American voters by profiling their psychology and behavior based on the monitoring of their activities on Facebook. The suspicion is that Cambridge Analytica influenced the voting intentions of millions of people thanks to the skilful use of personal data acquired illegally, without the knowledge of the voters themselves. We still remember the words of Mark Zuckerberg, fiery red and in a lake of sweat, in the European Parliament, as he apologized for what happened with the possible misuse of the data of 87 million users, 2.7 million of whom are Europeans.
It should be noted, however, that the acquisition of big data can take place in various ways, even absolutely lawful. By accessing Application Programming Interfaces made available by web services; using web scraping software; importing data from databases with tools already used for data movement in Data Warehousing systems; reading continuous streams of data through systems capable of capturing events, processing them and saving them efficiently on a database.
But when it comes to data processing/archiving in Europe, there is news. On 12 September, the European Commission presented its proposal for a regulation on preventing the spread of terrorist content online. The draft legislation aims to introduce an obligation within the European Union to require hosting service providers to take preventive action against terrorist content. But what exactly is required of hosting providers? First, introduce specific bans on the dissemination of terrorist content and remove it (if the competent authorities request it) within one hour of the notice ̧publish transparency reports on the orders received and the measures taken, and report to the authorities on its measures taken to combat online terrorism.
The
CISPE,
Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe, a coalition of Cloud Computing leaders serving millions of customers in Europe, is the first to rise up. According to the group of providers, in fact, the European Commission would be turning to the wrong interlocutors because “Cloud Providers provide infrastructures and are not content management or generation platforms; providers are not “controllers” and what the Commission asks for is not manageable“. In a press release, the CISPE clarifies that “wants to contribute to the fight against terrorism” but thinks that the regulation does not take into account the role of a hosting service provider and, if the issue of data and its management becomes increasingly important and delicate, “We are in it but we want to be there in the right way“.
So, let’s go back to where we started by quoting Mark Zuckerberg again about the Web. According to the Facebook guru “The web would be at a very important turning point. Until recently -Declared- The norm on the web was that most things weren’t social, and most people didn’t use their real identity. We are building a new web in which the social is at the base“.
That’s right, the social. But at what price?
