Page 35 - Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2022 Edition

P. 35

Each minute, Internet users spend $443,000 on Amazon, post 347,000 Tweets, share 1.7 million pieces
of content on Facebook, and upload over 500 hours of video to YouTube, according to Domo. Each of
those millions of transactions is comprised of multiple datapoints—IP addresses, credit card information,
geographic location, language and grammar, gender, skin tone, biometrics—the list goes on. By 2025,
the total amount of data that will be created, copied, or consumed will reach 181 zettabytes. For
reference, the typed letter “a” is one byte. One zettabyte is roughly the equivalent of a typed letter “a” for
every grain of sand on all the beaches on earth. The Library of Congress contains 16 petabytes of
information. There are 1 million petabytes in a zettabyte.

Every action we take online enlarges the boundless diaspora of data uniquely attributable to each of us.
And while data privacy and protection have become the subject of much legal scrutiny recently, few
people understand just how important their data really is. It has become tiresome to hear the trite phrase:
“if you are not paying for a product, you are the product.” With the technological advancements in AI
looming large on the horizon, perhaps it is more accurate to say, “your data is the product.”

Free social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok all use their mobile applications to
harvest geolocational data, photos and videos, contacts, device and browser type, likes, tweets, posts,
even how long users pause on particular posts or advertisements as they scroll through their feeds.
TikTok also collects biometrics and anything copied to a device’s clipboard—including usernames and
passwords from other applications. And Google scans the content of every email a Gmail user sends and
receives.

The portrait tech companies are able to paint about individual users is astounding. In a 2014 study,
researchers from Stanford University and the University of Cambridge found that Facebook needs 10
likes to know a user better than their co-worker, 70 likes to surpass a friend, and 300 likes to know
someone more personally than their spouse. Given Moore’s law, stating that computing power doubles
every two years, social media platforms very likely know their users far more intimately today with far
fewer engagements.

Regulators and privacy advocates are staunchly opposed to the unchecked and nonconsensual
collection of personal information, whether indirectly through third-party cookies or directly by social
media platforms, online retailers, or other service providers. Many regulatory bodies and legislatures
have established legal frameworks to try and curb the collection and monetization of personal information
due to privacy concerns. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer
Privacy Act (CCPA), and Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) are all examples of
legislation that limit data collection and sales. The regulatory logic is that for individuals to unknowingly
cede their digital fingerprint to major technology companies who aggregate data from every conceivable
online activity constitutes unreasonable and intrusive surveillance that poses a risk in individual privacy.

However, while the collection of significant amounts of personal data does pose privacy concerns, over-
regulation of data collection and sharing could have significant adverse effects on America’s future
economic and national security. Though huge swaths of data collected and aggregated by tech giants
are used for targeted advertising and enhancing user experience, they are also being used to develop
the data-driven technologies that will determine the future of America’s standing on the world stage—
namely, Artificial Intelligence.

To realize the benefits of AI—that is, simulated human inferences and decision-making processes—
developers require large quantities of high-quality data to train the AI. Training data is used by machine
learning algorithms to “self-teach” AI to perform specific tasks. For instance, whenever Gmail requires its
users to authenticate their accounts by selecting pictures of a stoplight or when Google Maps directs a

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