DailyPost 541
CAN DATA EVER BE SAFE?
From critical infrastructure to Cambridge Analytica & Facebook, the aghast users across the globe wants to know, can their data ever be safe? Cyber Security for an IT giant is measured in terms of Return on Investment, RoI, can this be a logical measure! If you can’t keep the data, why should you control it & run your whole business model on it. Since, the Target attack manifested that the antidote to RoI is Decimation, a pill they are not ready to swallow. Public outcry can make it happen. The markets are resonating with the same sentiment.
Mark Zuckerberg lost $6billion in a day after the Cambridge Analytica revelation. Facebook cannot be better off losing $35billion, its shares tumbled eight percent on Monday. Undeniably, stock markets responded to the public sentiments. Overall tech stocks also took a beating by two percent on NASDAQ. Google’s parent company Alphabet lost four percent or $27.3billion in its market cap. If this is treated as yet another market tumble by these companies, the future can only be a Doomsday scenario. Who knows their databases would have to be opened to public scrutiny? And why not? The data is ours & we have all rights to it.
Facebook said Cambridge Analytica was asked to destroy the data in 2015. What is the data destruction mechanism? The company instead continued to store ”most or all,” of the data. It ”harvested” data to influence US elections 2016, without users’ permission. Shamelessly, Facebook states, its ”robust data protection policies complied with US, international, EU & national regulations.” What a mockery of compliance & audit?
With all path breaking technologies at their command for creating bountiful profits, can’t they develop such technologies for this purpose! Compliance is used as a smokescreen by these companies to gleefully continue with data arm twisting: users, regulators & governments. It’s time to crack the whip. It is a world held hostage. How long will it be allowed to continue?
EITHER KEEP DATA SAFE OR GET OUT OF BUSINESS.
Sanjay Sahay