Question

how privacy, security, and ethics in computer system changed your life?

Answer 1

Human beings value their privacy and the protection of their personal sphere of life. They value some control over who knows what about them. They certainly do not want their personal information to be accessible to just anyone at any time. But recent advances in information technology threaten privacy and have reduced the amount of control over personal data and open up the possibility of a range of negative consequences as a result of access to personal data. In the second half of the 20th century data protection regimes have been put in place as a response to increasing levels of processing of personal data. The 21st century has become the century of big data and advanced information technology (e.g. forms of deep learning), the rise of big tech companies and the platform economy, which comes with the storage and processing of exabytes of data.

The revelations of Edward Snowden, and more recently the Cambridge Analytica case (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison 2018) have demonstrated that worries about negative consequences are real. The technical capabilities to collect, store and search large quantities of data concerning telephone conversations, internet searches and electronic payment are now in place and are routinely used by government agencies and corporate actors alike. The rise of China and the large scale of use and spread of advanced digital technologies for surveillance and control have only added to the concern of many. For business firms, personal data about customers and potential customers are now also a key asset. The scope and purpose of the personal data centred business models of Big Tech (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) has been described in detail by Shoshana Zuboff (2018) under the label “surveillance capitalism”.

At the same time, the meaning and value of privacy remains the subject of considerable controversy. The combination of increasing power of new technology and the declining clarity and agreement on privacy give rise to problems concerning law, policy and ethics. Many of these conceptual debates and issues are situated in the context of interpretation and analysis of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was adopted by the EU in spring 2018 as the successor of the EU 1995 Directives, with application far beyond the borders of the European Union.