Nanos Research recently undertook an interesting poll entitled “Impact of Technology on Society”.
On the plus side, it appears that more than 50% of Canadians believe technology can have both a positive impact on the provision of healthcare required in old age and providing solutions to climate change. However, there was a bit of a dark cloud in that the poll found Canadians are skeptical in relation to technological advances protecting their privacy. In fact, 34% believe that there is a negative force in currently in play.
Is this general concern a surprise? We are currently living in an era where popular social media websites are constantly increasing the size of massive 8,000 word privacy policies and re-jigging over 50 privacy settings to keep users in the dark and their usage and data sharing as open as possible. Our mobile phones are under increased privacy attack as hundreds of thousands of essentially untrusted applications access our data and physical location data without properly informing us. When you leave your house, visit your friends, do your shopping, head to the office, travel through airports and go on road trips, your geo-location data is grabbed, recorded, tracked, stored, swapped and sold. Put this data together with geo-location information gleaned from photos off of your social media website and that is a lot of personal data exiting your sphere of control.
Probably a good idea to learn how to take your privacy back by participating in privacy day (28 January), privacy month (February)!
You can review the entire study here: http://www.nanosresearch.com/library/polls/POLNAT-W14-T592E.pdf
Craig Delmage, CISSP