5Q: Adam Tanner, author, on the darkside of personal data harvesting

You might think a book that tackles a topic as decidedly modern as big data might have its origins in the 21^st Century.

But it was a chilling run-in with the Stasi, the East German secret police, back in 1988 that inspired Adam Tanner to write What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data—Lifeblood of Big Business—and the End of Privacy as We Know It.

In the book, Tanner, an American journalist, explores how our personal information is harvested and aggregated by internet giants, leading retailers, and other firms, whether we like it or not. He warns that, while there are many benefits to the free flow of all this data, there is a dark, unregulated, and destructive side as well.

We caught up with Tanner at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts in advance of his scheduled visit to Toronto on Jan. 27, where he will deliver a lecture on his new book, and his fascinating findings, as part of the 2015 Ramsay Talks speaker series.

But first, we wanted to hear more about that intriguing experience in East Germany in the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall:

AT: On a single day in Dresden, I was followed by 10 agents of the secret police, the Stasi. Years later I was able to obtain the files that they had collected about me. Over the course of the day these 10 guys followed me and jotted down everything I did in chronological order. They knew a lot about what I did — where I moved, who I spoke with. But, compared to today, it was a rather modest amount of information.

They (the Stasi) knew some things about me, but just carrying around a cell phone now with a locational data takes care of a good measure of what those agents were doing all those years ago when they were following me around.

The fact that you roll that story into our current lives makes me wonder how wary we, as consumers, should be about who’s got our personal data. Am I wrong to be concerned?

Obviously there is a big difference between state collection of data in somewhere like East Germany and what marketers do today. Ultimately marketers just want to sell us things, but there can be negative consequences from the bulk aggregation of data. When you put more and more information together, you can have a very revealing portrait of what someone is up to in their lives, revealing things that can include much more intimate information such as on your medical background, your political beliefs and your sexual orientation. Things like that can be sensitive, or they can just be things that you don’t want revealed to everyone.

Big data has its purpose, but do the benefits outweigh the negatives in your view?

In the book I have as a big test-case example Caesars Entertainment Corporation, the largest casino operator in the world. They have been very successful at winning the loyalty of customers by giving lots of rewards in exchange for personal data as part of the loyalty program. The Caesars’ example is an interesting one because it’s all done on a volunteer basis. If you don’t want to join the program, you can gamble anonymously. You have the choice. If you prefer to get the free meals and hotel rooms they offer you, you’re welcome to join the loyalty program and share your data.

That is a model that I actually like because you have the choice whether to join. They will tell you clearly what they do with your personal data and that is they will keep it in house to market to you only via Caesars. The problem is, in many places that you share your data, you do not have the choice and you do not have the knowledge of where your data is shared.

What kind of techniques are companies using to mine personal data without our knowledge?

It differs in different countries. Canada is a little bit closer to the European model with more privacy protection than in the United States. Often the way you get around stronger privacy protection is by offering some kind of perk. They may say, “There are sweepstakes so give us your details, have a chance to win a prize, get this coupon.” These are all opportunities to give lots of personal information about you. In some cases they may even require basic information just to use the service. Sometimes you see this in simple transactions. When you go in to get a haircut, for example, they might ask, “What’s your name? What’s your address? What’s your phone number? What’s your email?” It’s a lot of information to give up for a hair cut.

What’s the absolute downside of having your personal information out there, potentially in the hands of multiple marketers?

In the book I have a chapter on, for example, mug shot websites. Mug shots are taken when people are arrested. What these websites have done is coded them in a way that the photos are easy to find when you search for someone`s name. Then, when you click on them, (at least, traditionally this is the way these websites have operated) they will then offer you the opportunity to pay them to remove the photo. If you have been arrested for anything for a parking violation, to drunk driving to murder, your police photo will be taken and then when someone looks up your name they will find those photos, which are public documents. There are other variants of this kind of business, such as revenge-porn sites where you can post photos of a former lover that are humiliating and then those sites seek out money to remove the photos. There are all sorts of that kind of information that can be very unfavorable to the person whose data is being collected.

Is there a way to fully insulate ourselves against data mining, or is it too late?

There is no one thing that you can do like “Click this switch now and everything will be fine.” The same way there is no one food that you can eat that will make you much healthier. It is a whole variety of things that you do. It starts with basically having knowledge of what information might be gathered about you and what might be used. Then, it might have to do with what email address or phone numbers you share. You might have certain email addresses you use and you protect others. It may have to do with what information you reveal about yourself. In many cases, you may not care, but there might be more sensitive transactions that you want to pay more attention to. In the case of stored data, you might want to encrypt it to avoid the situation we saw a few months ago when some Hollywood celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, saw their accounts hacked and intimate photos released. All of these things take a little more effort, but, especially when it comes to more sensitive data, it is worthwhile.

In this post Edward Snowden world are we not more aware of why and how companies are asking for information? Why are we still being duped?

I think what people might not be as aware of is, in totality, how all the information adds up. If you order a pair of pants on the internet, they will know the size of your waist. If you order a very expensive cable television package with all the sports and movie channels and you do one or two other things, that, together, could suggest you are one big, fat guy sitting around watching a lot of television and maybe that reflects on what offers you get and what profile you cast in the world of marketing. That’s the problem. It’s not that any one site is the problem. It’s that, in totality, marketers can have an intimate portrait that is much more vast than you might be led to believe. The big data brokers often have thousands of individual data points about hundreds of millions of customers. That is a lot of information. That’s problem with the data. A lot of individual pieces of data may have been around about you decades ago, but it is the ease of putting them together in one place, to aggregate them and to keep them cheaply, that makes the current internet era quite different than the past.

Is there a danger of this information falling into the hands of government authorities or to be used in a way that has nothing to do with marketing?

Yes, you have seen a little bit of that in the case of the Snowden files. The National Security Agency accessed private companies, such as Facebook and Google, in order to supplement their information (on individuals). In my book, I focus on the commercial gathering of data because I think that impacts vastly more people in democratic countries than government collection of data. An agency like the NSA can be very sophisticated when they want information about certain individuals, but in most cases, they are not keeping an ongoing, active dossier about hundreds of millions of people. Marketers are doing that.

Any sense of how the regulations are changing to limit personal exposure to data mining?

This year, in the fall, I attended the annual data privacy commissioners meeting where top privacy experts from around the world gathered together. One area that was talked about has to do with the “Internet of things.” That is, the devices that will increasingly surround us at every turn, whether it is a pressure monitor for the amount of air in your car tires or the amount of milk in your refrigerator. A lot of these devices are very positive and great additions to our lives, but should their default setting be to transmit information about you to the company that makes it? Or should you, the consumer, have the choice so your data won’t be shared? That is a small example of how things are expanding so rapidly in the electronic collection of data. We, as a society, need to think about how we want to deal with it and what we will be open about.

You’ve been writing on this subject in your book and for many media articles. Do you find you are still losing personal information to marketers?

Yes, at every turn as you live in contemporary society, marketers are trying to gather data about you. In some cases, it just means saying no. I mentioned the hair cut example earlier because I was in a different city, New York, where I don’t live. I had a hair cut and they wanted all of my personal information. I politely declined, saying I don’t want to be on their mailing list. In other cases, if they are new companies that I am ordering from, I will generate an email address that bounces to my main email. That way I can control the flow of emails. If they start sending me too much email, I will shut that particular email address off, so I have control over it. There are small things that you can do. But, yeah, it’s an ongoing thing.

#author: darahhansen