October — the National Cyber Security Awareness Month — progresses, and we come together to reflect on the need to protect our transactions, and online businesses, it’s natural to also think about protecting our data and privacy. Between the 8.4 billion sensor devices that are interconnected — in-home electronic systems, health monitoring equipment, cars, and smartphones, our digital-first living, smart cities, relentless social networking, and other things cyber, the world is already producing approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes every day. A year ago, we sent out 3.5 million text messages a minute; now it’s about 15.2 million. In the time it takes you to type out this sentence, 456,000 tweets would have hit the airwaves, Google would have been bombarded with 3.6 million search queries and Uber would have taken almost 46,000 rides. At that same time, more than 103 million spam email messages will also have been delivered to unsuspecting mailboxes.
And that is only one part of a huge and rising threat to online data privacy. At the other end of the spectrum, we have instances of financial fraud that can be linked to the theft of digital identity. Several widely publicized breaches of databases held by large and reputed organizations have constantly alerted us to escalating threats to individual privacy and control over personal data. And yet it seems like a viable solution is far from sight.
