“Somebody Is Always Watching” – Data Privacy Interview

Data Privacy Day 2015: Expert Round Table w/ Fahmida Rashid & Byron Acohido

With Data Privacy Day behind us we can take a step back and analyze some of the current trends and developments.

We sat down with two leading experts in the field: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Byron Acohido and security journalist for SecurityWeek and PCMag Fahmida Y Rashid. Both comment on current threats for both the personal as well as business world through the rise of hackers and scammers who try to get our data in increasingly sophisticated manners. 

If you’ve missed our live round table discussion you can re-watch it here:  The transcript is available for download here.

Say Hello to The Experts

Byron Acohido

While at the Seattle Times earlier in his career, Acohido won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting and 11 other major journalism awards for exposing a deadly design flaw in Boeing 737 jetliners.

Fahmida Y. Rashid

She oversees content strategy for RSA Conference as Editor-in-chief. Prior to journalism, she spent over a decade as a network administrator and software developer.

Best Quotes from the Round Table Discussion

If you don’t have time to watch the whole episode we’ve just extracted some very interesting and thought-provoking quotes from the round table discussion:

“The Internet is a great tool. It’s a fabulously powerful tool that democratizes information, but that said, it was never built for secured transaction. It was built for distributed anonymous transaction, which is absolutely perfect for anybody with criminal purposes in mind.”

Byron Acohido

“All the stuff that you used to talk about with your friends in your living room, you’re suddenly doing it online, but we haven’t, as consumers, as general users, made that shift that the expectation of privacy that we had within our walls in our living room doesn’t actually exist on Facebook.”

Fahmida Rashid

“What’s happened is, essentially, the online advertising world led by Google and Facebook have done everything they can to track you online, to grab information about you, and then to use it for commercial purposes, which at this point is kind of singular. It’s to sell advertising and profiling for behavioral-targeting advertisements, but that’s opened up a whole can of worms.”

Byron Acohido

“There’s always someone listening, depending on whether you’re saying that someone is your email provider, your Internet service provider, if you want to go to the government, you want to go to a malicious actor, a cyber-criminal. It’s always in someone’s interest to be listening.”

Fahmida Rashid

“When you click on your internet and check your email and then check the weather site in the morning – this is true because I’ve seen several different people look into this – you are being tracked by over 200 different entities just by doing those two activities. We already have ultimate transparency.”

Byron Acohido

“Privacy policies have ballooned to several thousand words from when they used to be 500 and it’s kind of a double-edged sword. We punish companies for telling us exactly what they’re doing, and then we get angry when they don’t tell us what they’re doing.”

Fahmida Rashid

“The Internet of Things really is, again, just that next level of the commercial side. We haven’t even addressed the problems introduced two, five, and ten years ago, yet now we’re expanding the cloud on into mobile devices and the Internet of Things.”

Byron Acohido

“I think we have a habit of thinking of Internet of Things as those sci-fi movies from the 80s and the 90s where your house talks to you and cooks dinner for you. People don’t realize that the fact that you can sit at home and look on a website to see how your dog is doing over your web cam is an Internet of Things.”

Fahmida Rashid

“The Internet of Things really is, again, just that next level of the commercial side. We haven’t even addressed the problems introduced two, five, and ten years ago, yet now we’re expanding the cloud on into mobile devices and the Internet of Things.”

Byron Acohido

Privacy Policy Word Count (Facebook)