In the recent WWDC 2015 apple kept bringing up the privacy issues and was indirectly blaming companies like google for mining users data. Many people consider this as just a marketing strategy or most people don’t even care, because most of them think:
“ What is the harm in google storing our data? They are not doing anything bad with our data. All they are doing is sending us some targeted advertisements. And i don’t mind that”
But i think that people need to change this attitude. They need to be more careful while using these free services and should have a proper understanding of what data is being collected by these so called services. I am not saying this because i hate google or android or because i am an apple fan. I use both an iPhone and an android phone (even though the iPhone is my daily driver). I use os x, windows and linux every single day of my life. So Im not a guy who is stuck to one platform. But I am not a fan of google collecting all our data.
One of the main arguments that people have in favour of google collecting our data is the fact that almost all the google services are free. Does this mean that we have reached a stage where we are willing to trade in our privacy for some free services? Also then why do we have an issue when government agencies like NSA and CIA collect our data. They are trying to keep the people secure (in some sense) and so they are giving us something in return (when compared to the free services). So why do people have an issue when these agencies collect data and when google does the same, people dont even care.
I absolutely love google services. Especially the search and the maps. Apple maps is nowhere close to google maps in terms of functionality and correctness. Also i regularly use both of these google services. But i also hate the fact that google is mining all the possible data from my devices when I am using these services. Right now google isn’t doing anything with our data and they probably never will. But do we really want to keep going like this hoping that everything is going to be ok? No one can guarantee 100% that our data will always be safe. Nobody can guarantee that no one will be able to get their hands on our data. Im pretty sure google follows the highest security standards available in the industry and the collected data will be kept encrypted and will be spread across different servers that access to a few of them won’t let anyone make sense of the data stored in it. But google is not the most intelligent guy or organization in the world. There are other people out there who are trying to get hands on our data. And some of them are possible more intelligent than the people at google. If someone is able to break these security measures and is able to make sense of the data stored in these servers then we will start seeing the bad impacts of this data mining. Most people say its almost impossible for hackers to make sense of encrypted data. But haven’t we already seen the impacts of the heart bleed vulnerability. It was detected 2 years after the code was released and nobody even knows how many people used these vulnerabilities to steal data. And the fact that we haven’t found any other such vulnerability doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. There could be a million other vulnerabilities hiding in our codes that we haven’t detected yet.
All the recent hacks and the discovery of the vulnerabilities have taught us that nothing is 100% safe and secure. Sooner or later someone will come up with some techniques that can break the existing security measures. The only way we can keep our data safe is by staying one step ahead of these hackers by improving our security measures. But is this always possible? I believe that sooner or later someone will be able to get their hands on atlas some of the data collected by these companies. The question is how long we can prevent that from happening.
Nobody cared about retailers like target storing our credit card information until all of it was stolen and many people fell victim to identity theft. Right now we don’t care about all this because these problems haven’t happened to most of us. And because of this we are taking these issues lightly. But have we ever thought about how much data google has collected about our personal life? What happens if someone gets their hands on all this private data? The impact of such a data breach would a million times more than the impact of data breaches that has happened until now.
These are all things we need to think about seriously. This is why i really admire the approach apple has taken. Im pretty sure with the limited amount of data that apple is collecting from people they will never be able to provide a service that is as good as google now. That is simply the truth. The question here is are we willing to trade our private data for a better service?
Googles latest services like the now on tap can function inside any app and can read all the information inside all the apps installed on our device. No apps need to be updated for this. An awesome feature right? But we should also realise that this means that google has been reading every single word inside every single app installed on our devices for a long time. Maybe they have mentioned about this as a small line in one of their hundreds of license agreements. But as a user did any of you know about this before? But now its high time that we start thinking about these issues. We need to be more careful about letting these companies use our data. Now on tap is one of the coolest feature i have seen in a few years and it shows us how much our technology has moved forward, but i will probably be staying away from it because i just want to give anyone else so much control and power over my data.
I really hope that soon people will start realising the risks of letting other mine our data and will start taking steps to prevent these companies from collecting our data.
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