14 Creepy Ways To Use Big Data
The amount of data being collected about people, companies, and governments is unprecedented. What can be done with that data is downright frightening. From bedrooms to boardrooms, from Wall Street to Main Street, the ground is shifting in ways that only the most cyber-savvy can anticipate. We reveal the creepy ways to use data now and in the near future.
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Each day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. As more sensors find their way into everything from smartphones to household appliances, cars, and entire cities, it's possible to gain unprecedented insight into the behaviors, motivations, actions, and plans of individuals and organizations.
"Privacy is gone," said Walter O'Brien, founder and CEO of Scorpion Computer Services, the real-life company (with a real live person) upon which the CBS TV series Scorpion is based. "If it's online, it's possible to get at it."
Information is in high demand because it represents power and money. People and organizations are willing pay handsomely for information, whether it's a data feed, a trade secret, IP, credit card numbers, email addresses, passwords, or personal identities. "So much information that consumers deem personal is, in fact, quite readily accessible," said Yoram Golandsky, CEO of cyber-risk consultancy and solution provider CybeRisk Security Solutions, in an interview. "There isn't one repository that can't be broken into. Eventually we find a way in."
Danny Rogers, co-founder and CEO of information security company Terbium Labs estimates that 20% of the US population has been affected by a data breach, based on some rough sampling he did. When searching for a particular compromised email address on the Dark Web, Rogers discovered it had been leaked via 50 different sources.
[ Having trouble making sense of disparate data? Read Data Visualizations: 11 Ways To Bring Analytics To Life. ]
"It's a massive problem. Personal information is being disseminated far and wide. I don't think people appreciate how far and wide," said Rogers, in an interview. "It's getting to the point where you have to assume your data is not safe with anybody."
While the warnings may sound alarmist or even paranoid, consider the sources: A world-class hacker and security expert, another sought-after security expert, and a Dark Web expert. Happy Halloween, kids. Here are 14 scary examples of what can be done with data.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) admitted in late September that 5.6 million federal employee fingerprints had been stolen. Also compromised were the addresses and Social Security numbers of 21 million current and former government employees.
"Those fingerprints can be replicated now using 3D printers. [Hackers have] also stolen flight information and healthcare information and who's visited Ashley Madison," said Walter O'Brien, CEO of Scorpion Computer Services and executive producer of CBS's Scorpion TV show. O'Brien spins a scenario of how all that information might combined and used by those who seek to do harm. "I can now see that these people with top-secret clearance, who all flew to a prime location in Virginia after 9/11, are probably top-level spies working in a spy ring. Two of them have medical issues and the other one is cheating on his wife. Now I can blackmail them into giving me their passwords."
You think you're too savvy to fall victim to social engineering. Yet, it happens often, even to very bright people. It's an effective technique, and there are countless, creative ways to do it.
"The amount of information we can find on a person from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blog postings [is significant], and that's without leaving the office," said Yoram Golandsky, CEO of CybeRisk Security Solutions. "We create a profile so we can create similarity with that person."
Do you prefer blondes? Cycling? Volunteering for certain causes? If so, those things can be used to trick you into disclosing sensitive information. This is especially dangerous if you're someone with administrative access, such as a security or database administrator. "This is the way we get people to give us their passwords. If I have all that information on you, your whereabouts, what you like to do, the ability to socially engineer you becomes a very easy task," Golandsky said.
Congratulations on your success. You're an executive, board member or other high-profile individual who is an especially attractive target. Maybe it's you they're targeting, maybe it's the company or brand with which you're associated. Either way, your personal information is out on the Dark Web so it can be used as leverage.
"We see a lot of sensitive corporate information. It's often popular to leak personal details of board members or executives of public companies for political activism or blackmail," said Danny Rogers, co-founder and CEO of Terbium Labs. "We've seen Bill Gates' information on tens or hundreds of places on the Dark Web. There was a big data breach awhile back [that involved] the credit reports of high-profile individuals. Personal information was leaked for the sake of voyeurism."
That clandestine affair you're having may not be the big secret you think it is. If your city or town is getting "smarter," there are cameras scattered about, at least some of which are used for facial recognition by law enforcement officials.
"If I can track your car and recognize your face, then I know when you're meeting with your lover, whether you like it or not. I know that you're going to do more than play tennis," said Yoram Golandsky, CEO of CybeRisk Security Solutions. "History has told us that money can buy anything. If I can give someone $10,000 or $50,000 to get the information, I can do whatever I want with that information."
Pregnant women have good reasons to keep their pregnancies quiet. Yet, retailers may know more than their closest friends and relatives. Take Target, for example. One of its statisticians identified purchasing patterns common among pregnant women using data the store had collected, as well as data from other sources. Using the data, he was able to predict the likelihood of a pregnancy, as well as the due date within a narrow window of time. Target used the information to send coupons that corresponded to different stages of pregnancy. One of the recipients was a 16-year-old girl who hadn't revealed her condition to her father, with whom she lived.
"We've had cases where people's daughters received all these offers for family planning and maternity courses and things like that, and the parents are like, 'My daughter's not pregnant.' It turns out that the daughter was pregnant, and the daughter didn't know either. It's just predictive analysis," said Walter O'Brien, CEO of Scorpion Computer Services and executive producer of CBS's Scorpion TV show.
Given the amount of data that's available today, it is possible to do a lot of things; whether it's wise to do them is often the more important question.
Google self-driving cars have driven more than 1 million miles. The cars have been involved in 11 minor accidents, all of which were apparently caused by the humans driving the other cars involved in the accidents. In 2009, the human average was 185 accidents per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) or 1.85 accidents per 1 million VMT. While Google has a way to go before its self-driving cars hit the 100 million-mile mark, self-driving cars don't get drunk, sleepy, stoned, angry, or distracted in the ways that tend to cause automobile accidents when humans are driving. On the other hand, it's likely that one or more Google cars will get hacked at some point. And there are some tough decisions to be made along the way.
"Eventually, a decision will have to be made around programming a self-driving car to either sacrifice the lives of the vehicle occupants or the life of others when death is inevitable," said Wah-Kwan Lin, data scientist at advanced analytics software provider Lavastorm Analytics, in an interview. "This is a situation where you're allowing the technology, and the people behind the technology, to decide life-or-death scenarios. Realistically, the formulation of the algorithms and programming parameters should be guided by the data. It comes down to what parameters we use to decide the value of a life."
Facial recognition, motion analysis, and posture analysis are being combined for the purpose of behavioral profiling. Law enforcement officials use that information for crime prevention.
"If someone is moving furtively around the airport and behaving suspiciously, and that's being detected using machine learning and other algorithms, are we getting into the Minority Report scenario where they're predicting the event before it happens? What if you're pacing back and forth because you're worried about something unrelated?" said Tom Fountain, CTO of enterprise platform provider Pneuron, in an interview. "The more you aggregate these different slices of peoples' personas, then this whole thing gets a life of its own."
Chrysler recalled 1.4 million automobiles that may have been affected by a weakness in the Uconnect dashboard computers. The recall was announced following the hack of a Jeep in which two security researchers took control of the dashboard controls, steering, brakes, and transmission.
"We don't think of our cars as computers, but the average car generates about 25 gigs of data every hour. A car is really an operating system, and an operating system can be hacked," said Jennifer Priestley, director of Kennesaw State University's Center of Statistics and Analytical Services, in an interview.
Perhaps the scariest thing about personal information is that individuals have no control over it. Data is provided as necessary, or as agreed to, by governments, corporations, and individuals after which it may be sold, traded, leaked, or stolen. Through the deliberate acts and inadvertence of third parties, sensitive data can take on a life of its own.
"In this day and age, it's almost impossible to be disconnected. The second you pay a bill, see a doctor, [or] pick up the phone, it creates a data point somewhere," said Wah-Kwan Lin, data scientist at Lavastorm Analytics. "It's unclear what systems these data are being contained within. Are there governance controls around who can use the data, and do they have the infrastructure to regulate how the data is used? Even with the infrastructure, do we have account measures in place to ensure that?"
You have had a sinking feeling in your stomach, and it seems like people at work are treating you differently. Then again, maybe you're being paranoid.
Your bank knows the truth: You're about to get a pink slip.
"You get a bank deposit in your account every two weeks. The bank's early warning system will tell me that you're no longer on the list for direct deposit. They know the HR department is putting a severance package together," said Walter O'Brien, CEO of Scorpion Computer Services and executive producer of CBS' Scorpion TV show.
Welcome to the world of marketing, where your decisions may not be your own. That's always been the case with effective marketing, but with the amount of information available about today's shoppers, you can now be manipulated in a very personal way.
"How do you trust your retailer if they're selling your data or mining it and predictively deciding what they're going to promote to you, or they're so sloppy they get hacked and your information is taken?" said Tom Fountain, CEO of enterprise platform provider Pneuron. "It's a very tenuous relationship anymore with the people who are in a position to aggregate the information about you in ways that lead to some conclusions and actions that really take you down a path that you wouldn't have gone down on your own."
What's acceptable and what isn't changes with technological and social evolution. Recently, Capgemini released a report based on a social media sentiment analysis of more than 220,000 conversations covering 65 large retailers. The report revealed that 93% of all consumer sentiment was negative when it came to retailer privacy, and that 80% of sentiment about personalization was positive. Retailers are struggling to balance personalization and privacy. Meanwhile, it appears that consumers do not necessarily understand the relationship between the two.
Holes remain in data regardless of how much is collected. To better connect the dots, certain pieces of information are inferred. For example, rather than relying on blunt instruments such as demographics, big data is being used to understand entities and events in greater detail than was possible before.
"When we look at data in the aggregate, it provides a degree of insight that in many cases may not have been expected before. There's a qualitative shift where aggregated big data allows us to peer into individual lives in unprecedented detail," said Wah-Kwan Lin, data scientist at Lavastorm Analytics. "Inference is a frightening thing because with more data the inferences become more and more refined. There are a lot of privacy implications there."
Businesses are always looking for ways to attract new customers. To do that, they buy data from data brokers, use sophisticated online targeting tactics, and forge relationships with companies in other industries or sectors whose customer base is complementary to their own. It happens all the time as evidenced by the Starbucks stand in your local grocery store, or the ability to book a flight, hotel room, and rental car all using a single website.
"Retailer A and retailer B get together and are able to make a bunch of new assumptions about what you might like based on the combined experience.... In this day and age, it's almost impossible to be disconnected," said Doug Clare, a VP of product management at analytics software company FICO. "That doesn't mean they're authorized to share financial information, because financial information is tightly protected from a regulatory perspective. Merchandising information is not so highly protected, so the mashups there may be legal but scary and creepy. Those are the things I think we need to watch out for."
Businesses are always looking for ways to attract new customers. To do that, they buy data from data brokers, use sophisticated online targeting tactics, and forge relationships with companies in other industries or sectors whose customer base is complementary to their own. It happens all the time as evidenced by the Starbucks stand in your local grocery store, or the ability to book a flight, hotel room, and rental car all using a single website.
"Retailer A and retailer B get together and are able to make a bunch of new assumptions about what you might like based on the combined experience.... In this day and age, it's almost impossible to be disconnected," said Doug Clare, a VP of product management at analytics software company FICO. "That doesn't mean they're authorized to share financial information, because financial information is tightly protected from a regulatory perspective. Merchandising information is not so highly protected, so the mashups there may be legal but scary and creepy. Those are the things I think we need to watch out for."
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