A must read series from The Economist.

The magazine's September 29th issue features the second article in a series about the growing collection and mining of personal data around the world. This would include everything from well meaning health and safety data, to security-oriented government agencies and contractors to private companies' marketing efforts.

Across the globe, the amount of personally identifiable data being collected, parsed, sold, resold and the minimal level of regulation surrounding these processes is unprecedented in human history and provides just cause for alarm. But don't take my word for it, I'll let those radicals at The Economist lay it out for you:

These days, data about people's whereabouts, purchases, behaviour and personal lives are gathered, stored and shared on a scale that no dictator of the old school ever thought possible. Most of the time, there is nothing obviously malign about this. Governments say they need to gather data to ward off terrorism or protect public health; corporations say they do it to deliver goods and services more efficiently. But the ubiquity of electronic data-gathering and processing—and above all, its acceptance by the public—is still astonishing, even compared with a decade ago...

...electronic surveillance has not yet had a big impact on most people's lives, other than (usually) making it easier to deal with officialdom. But with the collection and centralisation of such vast amounts of data, the potential for abuse is huge and the safeguards paltry. Ross Anderson, a professor at Cambridge University in Britain, has compared the present situation to a “boiled frog”—which fails to jump out of the saucepan as the water gradually heats. If liberty is eroded slowly, people will get used to it. He added a caveat: it was possible the invasion of privacy would reach a critical mass and prompt a revolt...

The whole piece - the whole series in fact - is required reading.

-- MDT

Labels: data brokers, data mining, Seisint, The Economist, The Matrix