What is the future of digital privacy?
Data is everywhere – from mobile phones to laptops, smartwatches and smart homes. At the same time, data is also one click away from falling into the wrong hands.
We live in a digital world where more data is being created and captured in every aspect of our daily lives. With digitalisation continuing to grow around the world, many services are becoming more and more data-driven. Whilst the collection of users’ personal information can help to enrich consumer experiences and opportunities, it’s important that we as a society are aware of the potential risks and threats when sharing personal data online.
The last ten years has highlighted that this sharing is not only a risk, but sometimes a certain danger. As we continue in 2020 and beyond, it’s important we reflect on the year ahead and what could happen to digital privacy and data protection – so that we can continue to help keep everyone’s sensitive information safe.
As we see it now, governments will continue to exert stricter control over user data and tighten security. This may be blamed on intensifying terrorism and instability in the world and worryingly wide access to users’ personal information from businesses.
While the rationale behind the above is clear, enhanced access to user data naturally implies many risks, such as unauthorised access and consequently compromising privacy or even leaking information.
The biggest challenge posed to regulating parties will always be constantly adapting regulations at the same speed new technologies are developed. We currently don’t see a huge trend in companies changing their behaviour in dealing with user data. The only improvement is that users are being asked to give their consent over how the data is used, and it now being mandatory in many countries. We don’t see any strong trend in adding real-life security for protecting sensitive user data. Moreover, there’s already a growing gap between regulation and real-life practice. With the latter being much faster, we have ‘toothless’ regulations as a result – not strong enough measures in place.
Advice for consumers here is simple – try to limit your data-sharing patterns online. Avoid exposing your data and sensitive information unless it is necessary.
The trends outlined above will clearly drive privacy protection technologies. Tech-savvy users will know their way around such solutions, with more technologies arising to circumvent them – inevitably extending the arms race in this area.
At the same time, users will become more proactive when it comes to their privacy, and this will influence higher demand for password managers, VPN services, tokens for two-factor authentication (2FA) and special privacy solutions. However, protection mechanisms like 2FA tokens and password managers are just at the endpoint, while attacks and misuse are often happening at the backend.
