PrivacyPrivacy by design: Protecting privacy in the digital world

Published 1 July 2015

It is a fact of modern life — with every click, every tweet, every Facebook Like, we hand over information about ourselves to organizations which are desperate to know all of our secrets, in the hope that those secrets can be used to sell us something. What power can individuals have over their data when their every move online is being tracked? Researchers are building new systems that shift the power back to individual users, and could make personal data faster to access and at much lower cost.

What power can individuals have over their data when their every move online is being tracked? Researchers at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory are building new systems that shift the power back to individual users, and could make personal data faster to access and at much lower cost.

It is a fact of modern life — with every click, every tweet, every Facebook Like, we hand over information about ourselves to organizations which are desperate to know all of our secrets, in the hope that those secrets can be used to sell us something.

Companies have been collecting every possible scrap of information from their customers since long before the internet age, but with more powerful computers, cheaper storage and ubiquitous online use, the methods organizations use to gather information about people have become ever-more sophisticated. And sometimes those organizations know us better than our own families or friends.

For example, several years ago, data analysis tools used by the U.S. retailer Target had become so precise that they were able to determine, with astonishing accuracy, whether a woman was pregnant and how far along she was, based on her purchase of certain products. And in one particularly embarrassing incident, Target knew that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, much to her father’s displeasure.

“What Target learned from that incident is that marketing too accurately can really make people squeamish,” says Professor Jon Crowcroft of the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. “But if they made their marketing a little less accurate by increasing the amount of privacy they give their customers, they found they can still retain or increase their customer base without making people feel as if they’re being spied on.”

A University of Cambridge release reports that Crowcroft’s research is in the area of “privacy by design” — systems that allow us to live in the digital world and protect our privacy at the same time. As the concept of the Internet of Things — Internet-connected washing machines, toasters and televisions — becomes reality, Crowcroft insists that privacy by design is needed to address the massive power imbalance that occurs when our personal data is shared with, and sold by, corporations, governments, and other organizations.