Description
The Discussion Forum will be graded using the following:
50% for your initial post
25% for response one
25% for response two
Points will be deducted for poor quality participation.
Discussions will revolve around current events. If I ask you a question, I expect you to answer my question. I also encourage you to be critical and respond to one of the discussion threads with a professional counterargument. Remember, professionalism and common courtesy are expected during the Discussion Forum dialogues.
Your initial post must be a minimum of 500 words.
You must respond to at least two people.
You must cite at least two sources using APA in-text citations.
The Due Date in Canvas is the date for the initial post in the discussion forum. The Until Date is the date you must respond to at least two people in the discussion forum.
For maximum credit you must:
Be articulate, thoughtful, yet concise (quality over quantity)
Demonstrate critical thinking and in-depth dialogue
The objective of the discussion forums is to develop a discussion that stimulates critical thinking
Demonstrate professionalism, common courtesy, and respect during the discussions
Actively participate in the discussions
Responding to other students
Asking questions
Challenging another person’s argument
Using information from your assigned readings
Using outside resources to the discussion
Demonstrating critical thinking
Active and timely engagement – at least three days in the assignment period
DO NOT
Respond with a simple, Great Post! I agree with you!
Miss the initial post due date
Miss responding to at least two people in the Discussion Forum
Discussion Forum Resources:
Read Data and Goliath:
Chapter 10-14 pp. 125-189
Read information on the California Consumer Privacy ActLinks to an external site. (CCPA)
Read Information on the European Union General Data protection RegulationsLinks to an external site. (GDPR)
Conduct Individual Research – on CCPA and GDPR
Discussion Prompt:
After reading Data and Goliath, the CCPA, and the GDPR, and conducting individual research, discuss the following privacy issues from the perspective of surveillance:
Why does the European Union favor controlling commercial surveillance over government surveillance and, conversely in the United States, society favors controlling government surveillance over commercial surveillance.
Which entity – government or commercial – posses the largest threat to society?
Unformatted Attachment Preview
SELECTED BOOKS BY BRUCE SCHNEIER
Carry On: Sound Advice from Schneier on Security (2013)
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive (2012)
Schneier on Security (2008)
Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World (2003)
Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World (2000)
Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C (1994 and 1996)
To Karen: DMASC
Contents
Introduction
Part One: The World We’re Creating
1. Data as a By-product of Computing
2. Data as Surveillance
3. Analyzing Our Data
4. The Business of Surveillance
5. Government Surveillance and Control
6. Consolidation of Institutional Control
Part Two: What’s at Stake
7. Political Liberty and Justice
8. Commercial Fairness and Equality
9. Business Competitiveness
10. Privacy
11. Security
Part Three: What to Do About It
12. Principles
13. Solutions for Government
14. Solutions for Corporations
15. Solutions for the Rest of Us
16. Social Norms and the Big Data Trade-off
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
If you need to be convinced that you’re living in a science-fiction world, look at your cell
phone. This cute, sleek, incredibly powerful tool has become so central to our lives that
we take it for granted. It seems perfectly normal to pull this device out of your pocket, no
matter where you are on the planet, and use it to talk to someone else, no matter where the
person is on the planet.
Yet every morning when you put your cell phone in your pocket, you’re making an
implicit bargain with the carrier: “I want to make and receive mobile calls; in exchange, I
allow this company to know where I am at all times.” The bargain isn’t specified in any
contract, but it’s inherent in how the service works. You probably hadn’t thought about it,
but now that I’ve pointed it out, you might well think it’s a pretty good bargain. Cell
phones really are great, and they can’t work unless the cell phone companies know where
you are, which means they keep you under their surveillance.
This is a very intimate form of surveillance. Your cell phone tracks where you live and
where you work. It tracks where you like to spend your weekends and evenings. It tracks
how often you go to church (and which church), how much time you spend in a bar, and
whether you speed when you drive. It tracks—since it knows about all the other phones in
your area—whom you spend your days with, whom you meet for lunch, and whom you
sleep with. The accumulated data can probably paint a better picture of how you spend
your time than you can, because it doesn’t have to rely on human memory. In 2012,
researchers were able to use this data to predict where people would be 24 hours later, to
within 20 meters.
Before cell phones, if someone wanted to know all of this, he would have had to hire a
private investigator to follow you around taking notes. Now that job is obsolete; the cell
phone in your pocket does all of this automatically. It might be that no one retrieves that
information, but it is there for the taking.
Your location information is valuable, and everyone wants access to it. The police
want it. Cell phone location analysis is useful in criminal investigations in several different
ways. The police can “ping” a particular phone to determine where it is, use historical data
to determine where it has been, and collect all the cell phone location data from a specific
area to figure out who was there and when. More and more, police are using this data for
exactly these purposes.
Governments also use this same data for intimidation and social control. In 2014, the
government of Ukraine sent this positively Orwellian text message to people in Kiev
whose phones were at a certain place during a certain time period: “Dear subscriber, you
have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” Don’t think this behavior is
limited to totalitarian countries; in 2010, Michigan police sought information about every
cell phone in service near an expected labor protest. They didn’t bother getting a warrant
first.
There’s a whole industry devoted to tracking you in real time. Companies use your
phone to track you in stores to learn how you shop, track you on the road to determine
how close you might be to a particular store, and deliver advertising to your phone based
on where you are right now.
Your location data is so valuable that cell phone companies are now selling it to data
brokers, who in turn resell it to anyone willing to pay for it. Companies like Sense
Networks specialize in using this data to build personal profiles of each of us.
Phone companies are not the only source of cell phone data. The US company Verint
sells cell phone tracking systems to both corporations and governments worldwide. The
company’s website says that it’s “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions for
customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance,”
with clients in “more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries.” The UK company
Cobham sells a system that allows someone to send a “blind” call to a phone—one that
doesn’t ring, and isn’t detectable. The blind call forces the phone to transmit on a certain
frequency, allowing the sender to track that phone to within one meter. The company
boasts government customers in Algeria, Brunei, Ghana, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,
Singapore, and the United States. Defentek, a company mysteriously registered in
Panama, sells a system that can “locate and track any phone number in the world …
undetected and unknown by the network, carrier, or the target.” It’s not an idle boast;
telecommunications researcher Tobias Engel demonstrated the same thing at a hacker
conference in 2008. Criminals do the same today.
All this location tracking is based on the cellular system. There’s another entirely
different and more accurate location system built into your smartphone: GPS. This is what
provides location data to the various apps running on your phone. Some apps use location
data to deliver service: Google Maps, Uber, Yelp. Others, like Angry Birds, just want to be
able to collect and sell it.
You can do this, too. HelloSpy is an app that you can surreptitiously install on
someone else’s smartphone to track her. Perfect for an anxious mom wanting to spy on her
teenager—or an abusive man wanting to spy on his wife or girlfriend. Employers have
used apps like this to spy on their employees.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) and its UK counterpart, Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), use location data to track people. The NSA
collects cell phone location data from a variety of sources: the cell towers that phones
connect to, the location of Wi-Fi networks that phones log on to, and GPS location data
from Internet apps. Two of the NSA’s internal databases, code-named HAPPYFOOT and
FASCIA, contain comprehensive location information of devices worldwide. The NSA
uses the databases to track people’s movements, identify people who associate with people
of interest, and target drone strikes.
The NSA can allegedly track cell phones even when they are turned off.
I’ve just been talking about location information from one source—your cell phone—
but the issue is far larger than this. The computers you interact with are constantly
producing intimate personal data about you. It includes what you read, watch, and listen
to. It includes whom you talk to and what you say. Ultimately, it covers what you’re
thinking about, at least to the extent that your thoughts lead you to the Internet and search
engines. We are living in the golden age of surveillance.
Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy said it plainly way back in 1999: “You have
zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” He’s wrong about how we should react to surveillance,
of course, but he’s right that it’s becoming harder and harder to avoid surveillance and
maintain privacy.
Surveillance is a politically and emotionally loaded term, but I use it deliberately. The
US military defines surveillance as “systematic observation.” As I’ll explain, modern-day
electronic surveillance is exactly that. We’re all open books to both governments and
corporations; their ability to peer into our collective personal lives is greater than it has
ever been before.
The bargain you make, again and again, with various companies is surveillance in
exchange for free service. Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt and its director of ideas Jared
Cohen laid it out in their 2013 book, The New Digital Age. Here I’m paraphrasing their
message: if you let us have all your data, we will show you advertisements you want to
see and we’ll throw in free web search, e-mail, and all sorts of other services. It’s
convenience, basically. We are social animals, and there’s nothing more powerful or
rewarding than communicating with other people. Digital means have become the easiest
and quickest way to communicate. And why do we allow governments access? Because
we fear the terrorists, fear the strangers abducting our children, fear the drug dealers, fear
whatever bad guy is in vogue at the moment. That’s the NSA’s justification for its masssurveillance programs; if you let us have all of your data, we’ll relieve your fear.
The problem is that these aren’t good or fair bargains, at least as they’re structured
today. We’ve been accepting them too easily, and without really understanding the terms.
Here is what’s true. Today’s technology gives governments and corporations robust
capabilities for mass surveillance. Mass surveillance is dangerous. It enables
discrimination based on almost any criteria: race, religion, class, political beliefs. It is
being used to control what we see, what we can do, and, ultimately, what we say. It is
being done without offering citizens recourse or any real ability to opt out, and without
any meaningful checks and balances. It makes us less safe. It makes us less free. The rules
we had established to protect us from these dangers under earlier technological regimes
are now woefully insufficient; they are not working. We need to fix that, and we need to
do it very soon.
In this book, I make that case in three parts.
Part One describes the surveillance society we’re living in. Chapter 1 looks at the
varieties of personal data we generate as we go about our lives. It’s not just the cell phone
location data I’ve described. It’s also data about our phone calls, e-mails, and text
messages, plus all the webpages we read, our financial transaction data, and much more.
Most of us don’t realize the degree to which computers are integrated into everything we
do, or that computer storage has become cheap enough to make it feasible to indefinitely
save all the data we churn out. Most of us also underestimate just how easy it has become
to identify us using data that we consider anonymous.
Chapter 2 shows how all this data is used for surveillance. It happens everywhere. It
happens automatically, without human intervention. And it’s largely hidden from view.
This is ubiquitous mass surveillance.
It’s easy to focus on how data is collected by corporations and governments, but that
gives a distorted picture. The real story is how the different streams of data are processed,
correlated, and analyzed. And it’s not just one person’s data; it’s everyone’s data.
Ubiquitous mass surveillance is fundamentally different from just a lot of individual
surveillance, and it’s happening on a scale we’ve never seen before. I talk about this in
Chapter 3.
Surveillance data is largely collected by the corporations that we interact with, either
as customers or as users. Chapter 4 talks about business models of surveillance, primarily
personalized advertising. An entire data broker industry has sprung up around profiting
from our data, and our personal information is being bought and sold without our
knowledge and consent. This is being driven by a new model of computing, where our
data is stored in the cloud and accessed by devices like the iPhone that are under strict
manufacturer control. The result is unprecedented corporate access to and control over our
most intimate information.
Chapter 5 turns to government surveillance. Governments around the world are
surveilling their citizens, and breaking into computers both domestically and
internationally. They want to spy on everyone to find terrorists and criminals, and—
depending on the government—political activists, dissidents, environmental activists,
consumer advocates, and freethinkers. I focus mainly on the NSA, because this is the
secret government agency we know best, because of the documents Edward Snowden
released.
Corporations and governments alike have an insatiable appetite for our data, and I
discuss how the two work together in Chapter 6. I call it a “public-private surveillance
partnership,” and it’s an alliance that runs deep. It’s the primary reason that surveillance is
so pervasive, and it will impede attempts to reform the system.
All of this matters, even if you trust the corporations you interact with and the
government you’re living under. With that in mind, Part Two turns to the many
interrelated harms that arise from ubiquitous mass surveillance.
In Chapter 7, I discuss the harms caused by government surveillance. History has
repeatedly demonstrated the dangers of allowing governments to conduct unchecked mass
surveillance on their citizens. Potential harms include discrimination and control, chilling
effects on free speech and free thought, inevitable abuse, and loss of democracy and
liberty. The Internet has the potential to be an enormous driver of freedom and liberty
around the world; we’re squandering that potential by allowing governments to conduct
worldwide surveillance.
Chapter 8 turns to the harms caused by unfettered corporate surveillance. Private
companies now control the “places” on the Internet where we gather, and they’re mining
the information we leave there for their own benefit. By allowing companies to know
everything about us, we’re permitting them to categorize and manipulate us. This
manipulation is largely hidden and unregulated, and will become more effective as
technology improves.
Ubiquitous surveillance leads to other harms as well. Chapter 9 discusses the
economic harms, primarily to US businesses, that arise when the citizens of different
countries try to defend themselves against surveillance by the NSA and its allies. The
Internet is a global platform, and attempts by countries like Germany and Brazil to build
national walls around their data will cost companies that permit government surveillance
—particularly American companies—considerably.
In Chapter 10, I discuss the harms caused by a loss of privacy. Defenders of
surveillance—from the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic to the Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet to Google’s Eric Schmidt—have always relied on the old saw “If you
have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.” This is a dangerously narrow
conception of the value of privacy. Privacy is an essential human need, and central to our
ability to control how we relate to the world. Being stripped of privacy is fundamentally
dehumanizing, and it makes no difference whether the surveillance is conducted by an
undercover policeman following us around or by a computer algorithm tracking our every
move.
In Chapter 11, I turn to the harms to security caused by surveillance. Government mass
surveillance is often portrayed as a security benefit, something that protects us from
terrorism. Yet there’s no actual proof of any real successes against terrorism as a result of
mass surveillance, and significant evidence of harm. Enabling ubiquitous mass
surveillance requires maintaining an insecure Internet, which makes us all less safe from
rival governments, criminals, and hackers.
Finally, Part Three outlines what we need to do to protect ourselves from government
and corporate surveillance. The remedies are as complicated as the issues, and often
require fine attention to detail. Before I delve into specific technical and policy
recommendations, though, Chapter 12 offers eight general principles that should guide our
thinking.
The following two chapters lay out specific policy recommendations: for governments
in Chapter 13, and for corporations in Chapter 14. Some of these recommendations are
more detailed than others, and some are aspirational rather than immediately
implementable. All are important, though, and any omissions could subvert the other
solutions.
Chapter 15 turns to what each of us can do individually. I offer some practical
technical advice, as well as suggestions for political action. We’re living in a world where
technology can trump politics, and also where politics can trump technology. We need
both to work together.
I end, in Chapter 16, by looking at what we must do collectively as a society. Most of
the recommendations in Chapters 13 and 14 require a shift in how we perceive
surveillance and value privacy, because we’re not going to get any serious legal reforms
until society starts demanding them. There is enormous value in aggregating our data for
medical research, improving education, and other tasks that benefit society. We need to
figure out how to collectively get that value while minimizing the harms. This is the
fundamental issue that underlies everything in this book.
This book encompasses a lot, and necessarily covers ground quickly. The endnotes
include extensive references for those interested in delving deeper. Those are on the
book’s website as well: www.schneier.com/dg.html. There you’ll also find any updates to
the book, based on events that occurred after I finished the manuscript.
I write with a strong US bias. Most of the examples are from the US, and most of the
recommendations best apply to the US. For one thing, it’s what I know. But I also believe
that the US serves as a singular example of how things went wrong, and is in a singular
position to change things for the better.
My background is security and technology. For years, I have been writing about how
security technologies affect people, and vice versa. I have watched the rise of surveillance
in the information age, and have seen the many threats and insecurities in this new world.
I’m used to thinking about security problems, and about broader social issues through the
lens of security problems. This perspective gives me a singular understanding of both the
problems and the solutions.
I am not, and this book is not, anti-technology. The Internet, and the information age in
general, has brought enormous benefits to society. I believe they will continue to do so.
I’m not even anti-surveillance. The benefits of computers knowing what we’re doing have
been life-transforming. Surveillance has revolutionized traditional products and services,
and spawned entirely new categories of commerce. It has become an invaluable tool for
law enforcement. It helps people all around the world in all sorts of ways, and will
continue to do so far into the future.
Nevertheless, the threats of surveillance are real, and we’re not talking about them
enough. Our response to all this creeping surveillance has largely been passive. We don’t
think about the bargains we’re making, because they haven’t been laid out in front of us.
Technological changes occur, and we accept them for the most part. It’s hard to blame us;
the changes have been happening so fast that we haven’t really evaluated their effects or
weighed their consequences. This is how we ended up in a surveillance society. The
surveillance society snuck up on us.
It doesn’t have to be like this, but we have to take charge. We can start by
renegotiating the bargains we’re making with our data. We need to be proactive about how
we deal with new technologies. We need to think about what we want our technological
infrastructure to be, and what values we want it to embody. We need to balance the value
of our data to society with its personal nature. We need to examine our fears, and decide
how much of our privacy we are really willing to sacrifice for convenience. We need to
understand the many harms of overreaching surveillance.
And we need to fight back.
—Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 2014
1
Data as a By-product of Computing
Computers constantly produce data. It’s their input and output, but it’s also a by-product
of everything they do. In the normal course of their operations, computers continuously
document what they’re doing. They sense and record more than you’re aware of.
For instance, your word processor keeps a record of what you’ve written, including
your drafts and changes. When you hit “save,” your word processor records the new
version, but your computer doesn’t erase the old versions until it needs the disk space for
something else. Your word processor automatically saves your document every so often;
Microsoft Word saves mine every 20 minutes. Word also keeps a record of who created
the document, and often of who else worked on it.
Connect to the Internet, and the data you produce multiplies: records of websites you
visit, ads you click on, words you type. Your computer, the sites you visit, and the
computers in the network each produce data. Your browser sends data to websites about
what software you have, when it was installed, what features you’ve enabled, and so on. In
many cases, this data is enough to uniquely identify your computer.
Increasingly we communicate with our family, friends, co-workers, and casual
acquaintances via computers, using e-mail, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
SnapChat, WhatsApp, and whatever else is hot right now. Data is a by-product of this
high-tech socialization. These systems don’t just transfer data; they also create data
records of your interactions with others.
Walking around outside, you might not think that you’re producing data, but you are.
Your cell phone is constantly calculating its location based on which cell towers it’s near.
It’s not that your cell phone company particularly cares where you are, but it needs to
know where your cell phone is to route telephone calls to you.
Of course, if you actually use that phone, you produce more data: numbers dialed and
calls received, text messages sent and received, call duration, and so on. If it’s a
smartphone, it’s also a computer, and all your apps produce data when you use them—and
sometimes even when you’re not using them. Your phone probably has a GPS receiver,
which produces even more accurate location information than the cell tower location
alone. The GPS receiver in your smartphone pinpoints you to within 16 to 27 feet; cell
towers, to about 2,000 feet.
Purchase something in a store, and you produce more data. The cash register is a
computer, and it creates a record of what you purchased and the time and date you
purchased it. That data flows into the merchant’s computer system. Unless you paid cash,
your credit card or debit card information is tied to that purchase. That data is also sent to
the credit card company, and some of it comes back to you in your monthly bill.
There may be a video camera in the store, installed to record evidence in case of theft
or fraud. There’s another camera recording you when you use an ATM. There are more
cameras outside, monitoring buildings, sidewalks, roadways, and other public spaces.
Get into a car, and you generate yet more data. Modern cars are loaded with
computers, producing data on your speed, how hard you’re pressing on the pedals, what
position the steering wheel is in, and more. Much of that is automatically recorded in a
black box recorder, useful for figuring out what happened in an accident. There’s even a
computer in each tire, gathering pressure data. Take your car into the shop, and the first
thing the mechanic will do is access all that data to diagnose any problems. A self-driving
car could produce a gigabyte of data per second.
Snap a photo, and you’re at it again. Embedded in digital photos is information such as
the date, time, and location—yes, many cameras have GPS—of the photo’s capture;
generic information about the camera, lens, and settings; and an ID number of the camera
itself. If you upload the photo to the web, that information often remains attached to the
file.
It wasn’t always like this. In the era of newspapers, radio, and television, we received
information, but no record of the event was created. Now we get our news and
entertainment over the Internet. We used to speak to people face-to-face and then by
telephone; we now have conversations over text or e-mail. We used to buy things with
cash at a store; now we use credit cards over the Internet. We used to pay with coins at a
tollbooth, subway turnstile, or parking meter. Now we use automatic payment systems,
such as EZPass, that are connected to our license plate number and credit card. Taxis used
to be cash-only. Then we started paying by credit card. Now we’re using our smartphones
to access networked taxi systems like Uber and Lyft, which produce data records of the
transaction, plus our pickup and drop-off locations. With a few specific exceptions,
computers are now everywhere we engage in commerce and most places we engage with
our friends.
Last year, when my refrigerator broke, the serviceman replaced the computer that
controls it. I realized that I had been thinking about the refrigerator backwards: it’s not a
refrigerator with a computer, it’s a computer that keeps food cold. Just like that,
everything is turning into a computer. Your phone is a computer that makes calls. Your car
is a computer with wheels and an engine. Your oven is a computer that bakes lasagnas.
Your camera is a computer that takes pictures. Even our pets and livestock are now
regularly chipped; my cat is practically a computer that sleeps in the sun all day.
Computers are getting embedded into more and more kinds of products that connect to
the Internet. A company called Nest, which Google purchased in 2014 for more than $3
billion, makes an Internet-enabled thermostat. The smart thermostat adapts to your
behavior patterns and responds to what’s happening on the power grid. But to do all that, it
records more than your energy usage: it also tracks and records your home’s temperature,
humidity, ambient light, and any nearby movement. You can buy a smart refrigerator that
tracks the expiration dates of food, and a smart air conditioner that can learn your
preferences and maximize energy efficiency. There’s more coming: Nest is now selling a
smart smoke and carbon monoxide detector and is planning a whole line of additional
home sensors. Lots of other companies are working on a wide range of smart appliances.
This will all be necessary if we want to build the smart power grid, which will reduce
energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
We’re starting to collect and analyze data about our bodies as a means of improving
our health and well-being. If you wear a fitness tracking device like Fitbit or Jawbone, it
collects information about your movements awake and asleep, and uses that to analyze
both your exercise and sleep habits. It can determine when you’re having sex. Give the
device more information about yourself—how much you weigh, what you eat—and you
can learn even more. All of this data you share is available online, of course.
Many medical devices are starting to be Internet-enabled, collecting and reporting a
variety of biometric data. There are already—or will be soon—devices that continually
measure our vital signs, our moods, and our brain activity. It’s not just specialized devices;
current smartphones have some pretty sensitive motion sensors. As the price of DNA
sequencing continues to drop, more of us are signing up to generate and analyze our own
genetic data. Companies like 23andMe hope to use genomic data from their customers to
find genes associated with disease, leading to new and highly profitable cures. They’re
also talking about personalized marketing, and insurance companies may someday buy
their data to make business decisions.
Perhaps the extreme in the data-generating-self trend is lifelogging: continuously
capturing personal data. Already you can install lifelogging apps that record your activities
on your smartphone, such as when you talk to friends, play games, watch movies, and so
on. But this is just a shadow of what lifelogging will become. In the future, it will include
a video record. Google Glass is the first wearable device that has this potential, but others
are not far behind.
These are examples of the Internet of Things. Environmental sensors will detect
pollution levels. Smart inventory and control systems will reduce waste and save money.
Internet-connected computers will be in everything—smart cities, smart toothbrushes,
smart lightbulbs, smart sidewalk squares, smart pill bottles, smart clothing—because why
not? Estimates put the current number of Internet-connected devices at 10 billion. That’s
already more than the number of people on the planet, and I’ve seen predictions that it will
reach 30 billion by 2020. The hype level is pretty high, and we don’t yet know which
applications will work and which will be duds. What we do know is that they’re all going
to produce data, lots of data. The things around us will become the eyes and ears of the
Internet.
The privacy implications of all this connectivity are profound. All those smart
appliances will reduce greenhouse gas emissions—and they’ll also stream data about how
people move around within their houses and how they spend their time. Smart streetlights
will gather data on people’s movements outside. Cameras will only get better, smaller, and
more mobile. Raytheon is planning to fly a blimp over Washington, DC, and Baltimore in
2015 to test its ability to track “targets”—presumably vehicles—on the ground, in the
water, and in the air.
The upshot is that we interact with hundreds of computers every day, and soon it will
be thousands. Every one of those computers produces data. Very little of it is the obviously
juicy kind: what we ordered at a restaurant, our heart rate during our evening jog, or the
last love letter we wrote. Rather, much of it is a type of data called metadata. This is data
about data—information a computer system uses to operate or data that’s a by-product of
that operation. In a text message system, the messages themselves are data, but the
accounts that sent and received the message, and the date and time of the message, are all
metadata. An e-mail system is similar: the text of the e-mail is data, but the sender,
receiver, routing data, and message size are all metadata—and we can argue about how to
classify the subject line. In a photograph, the image is data; the date and time, camera
settings, camera serial number, and GPS coordinates of the photo are metadata. Metadata
may sound uninteresting, but, as I’ll explain, it’s anything but.
Still, this smog of data we produce is not necessarily a result of deviousness on
anyone’s part. Most of it is simply a natural by-product of computing. This is just the way
technology works right now. Data is the exhaust of the information age.
HOW MUCH DATA?
Some quick math. Your laptop probably has a 500-gigabyte hard drive. That big
backup drive you might have purchased with it can probably store two or three terabytes.
Your corporate network might have one thousand times that: a petabyte. There are names
for bigger numbers. A thousand petabytes is an exabyte (a billion billion bytes), a
thousand exabytes is a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes is a yottabyte. To put it in
human terms, an exabyte of data is 500 billion pages of text.
All of our data exhaust adds up. By 2010, we as a species were creating more data per
day than we did from the beginning of time until 2003. By 2015, 76 exabytes of data will
travel across the Internet every year.
As we start thinking of all this data, it’s easy to dismiss concerns about its retention
and use based on the assumption that there’s simply too much of it to save, and in any case
it would be too hard to sift through for nuggets of meaningful information. This used to be
true. In the early days of computing, most of this data—and certainly most of the metadata
—was thrown away soon after it was created. Saving it took too much memory. But the
cost of all aspects of computing has continuously fallen over the years, and amounts of
data that were impractical to store and process a decade ago are easy to deal with today. In
2015, a petabyte of cloud storage will cost $100,000 per year, down 90% from $1 million
in 2011. The result is that more and more data is
