Data Privacy Day: Exploring the link between data and safeguarding

Here at TrustElevate, we’re strong advocates of Data Privacy Day. Data privacy is incredibly important and increasingly critical to our society’s well being.

Over the past few years, fundamental changes to the ways in which we interact with platforms have been taking place, in large part due to the proliferation of large-scale, data-driven operations.

These operations have completely altered the landscape of the internet and have also altered the way we should all be thinking about our digital experiences and the ways in which they impact us in offline contexts.

Indeed, we know now that on big tech platforms, what happens to your data determines what you see and what you experience. Behavioural tracking and profiling feed into the algorithms that produce, for example, recommendations and, while these systems can and do prove helpful, today is a good day to think about some unintended consequences.

For example, some platforms have been documented as ‘detecting’ an interest in diet content and continuously offering users increasingly extreme pieces of said content. Rates of disordered eating are spiralling among children due to exposure to such content: NHS data for April — October 2021 showed a 41% increase in hospital admissions for children (<17) across all regions for eating disorders compared to 2020.

How does this relate to data privacy? Well, it highlights a use of data that perhaps those users wouldn’t have expected to be continuously tracked and processed in that way. But we also know that those instances of exposure will not have been isolated to the main feed of one platform.

Tech companies buy and sell users’ data all the time to companies representing advertisers. When a webpage loads, data about users’ interests are broadcast to tens or hundreds of companies to allow companies representing advertisers to compete to buy ad space to show specific users their ads.

This process is known in the online advertising industry as “real-time bidding” and is a particularly important issue in terms of data privacy, since users’ ‘privacy as expected’ is not upheld and sometimes companies use ‘dark patterns’, like making opt-out buttons hard to find) to get consent that users don’t really want to give. These practices are currently under investigation by a number of regulators including the ICO, and the Irish Data Protection Regulator and others.

The companies participating in real-time bidding will have been able to buy information about users’ interests and, potentially, their vulnerabilities (take a look at this report about the gambling industry) to keep them engaged and up their chances of buying the advertised products without consideration of the impact on users.

And the same recommendation systems also work to recommend users to one another.

Adults with a sexual interest in children no longer need to search extensively for children online to groom, they simply watch a few videos produced by children in a specific age band, gender and ethnicity that meets their preferences. Those children have been made vulnerable to predators because their data has been misappropriated to support systems that do not account for these kinds of consequences.

So, on Data Privacy Day 2022, we are promoting it in the spirit of advancing digital rights for all and to move toward a world in which our digital lives function as we expect them to.