On Privacy by Design | Data Driven Investor

We are living in an era dominated by technological advances and digital innovation. With respect to data, these advances have paved way for the immense potential of using centralized databases and other related infrastructures to capture, collect, store, mine and share data at an unimaginable pace and size ( big data). The data, which was once used or could only be used by the Government, who had the resources, manpower and the need to use it for some specific purposes, is now made available online, increasing its affordability and accessibility to a great extent.

In this digital age, all the transactions made by individuals on a daily basis, in a variety of settings are being constantly monitored and recorded — termed as the individual’s “digital footprints”. The recent developments in Information and Communication Technologies have facilitated a more sophisticated way for surveillance and profiling of people and has drastically changed the meaning of what constitutes as private and public information. The digital consumers know at some level that all their online actions, carefree meanderings like browsing, surfing, clicking are being recorded but are not really aware of the after processes like aggregation, analysis ( mining of data from different contexts), their capabilities and their implications.