CDC Blog : Innovation

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Privacy: The right to be left alone?

Posted At : June 14, 2010 7:37 PM by Tim Antos

Graduate Programme: Consulting

This blog was written by Robert Ord. Robert is an Associate Consultant who joined Capgemini in March 2010.

Security, safety and privacy. All words we have come to know and love in our day-to-day lives. You may be picturing long queues at airport scanners or having to remember the multiple passwords you have for internet sites. You may even be thinking of your personal technique for covering your pin entry at the kiosk. Whatever security, safety and privacy mean to you, have you ever given a thought to where your data ends up or who has access to it?

Working in a Capgemini community dealing with Border Management, it is words like these that we are talking about. Having the right information at the right time is critical to maintaining the safety of the population. Border agencies need to know who is arriving and where they are going. They need to know what your interests are to determine if you are a threat to the public. These decisions are based on information generated by you; biometrics, profile, activities and friends to name a few. Given the choice, how far would you allow this information to be shared freely?

The news would tell us that we care about privacy. Facebook recently had to change their whole privacy system to answer demands of the public. The colossal data store in Facebook’s (and others) possession is very commercially valuable. I have to ask myself how much trust I place in organisations like this to guard my data as I overtly guard my pin number. Will they mind if they accidentally let slip who my friends are or my mobile number? Well I would. That is part of my identity, the fundamental backdrop of safety, security and privacy. Our identities in the wrong hands can be a frightening and dangerous force.

It is a similar story for virtually all project teams in the professional services world. We handle sensitive data as a matter of routine and we have an obligation to protect this data. A current topical example is the age of The Cloud and the impact it is having on safety, security and privacy. Applications over the internet open new concerns of how to keep data private and secure. Public/private partnerships have the luxury to discuss privacy and designing a suitable framework. Consultants are called upon to assist with these difficult choices, but even making the decision on who should be invited to such a discussion is difficult to consider; open data sources contain millions of records.

I was very privileged to hear a world expert on this subject during a panel discussion at the recent World Congress of IT 2010. A point he made was to define the Latin routes of privacy: denied something. This could be a key in future personal data protection. I do not always have the option of open discussion in items of social importance, but where I do, I have the option to not give my data in the first place and for my data to be left alone. However, we must all take heed a popular quote, “if you try and protect 100% of everything, you end up protecting nothing”.