How important is your personal data security?

The sharing and selling of your personal data is a multi billion dollar industry.

Big Data is all about searching through lots of small pieces of data to form an overall picture. That is how Google and Amazon display ads on your computer related to what you might be interested in buying.

If you are a recently bought dypers from Walmart or another big store and you name and address are registered with them you will almost certainly receive offers through the post for other baby products and related services including offers from companies that want you to take out life insurance or start education funds for your new child.

The Federal Trade Commission feel it is time you had much more control over what data is held about you and what these companies can do with it.

On Wednesday 27 May 2014 the FTC said

“FTC Recommends Congress Require the Data Broker Industry to be More Transparent and Give Consumers Greater Control Over Their Personal Information”

“The extent of consumer profiling today means that data brokers often know as much – or even more – about us than our family and friends, including our online and in-store purchases, our political and religious affiliations, our income and socioeconomic status, and more,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. “It’s time to bring transparency and accountability to bear on this industry on behalf of consumers, many of whom are unaware that data brokers even exist.”

You can read the full report at FTC.gov

A cyber attack which led to the data breach of approximately 145 million users’ personal information reared its head this week, as eBay clamoured to reclaim control of its security by obligating its customers to change their passwords.

Personal but non-financial information had been breached after cyber criminals seized “a small number of employee log-in credentials”; phone numbers, addresses, passwords and full names.

Luckily, as yet no evidence has surfaced of this information being used anywhere for nefarious purposes, but the event has exposed the level of trust citizens place in companies which cannot or do not necessarily protect our data.

Shockingly, it was revealed that eBay, a multinational online shopping and auctioning site, responded with scant urgency following the initial breach in February. Requesting only this month that users change their passwords, a surge in site activity crashed its server.

Thanks to http://www.theinformationdaily.com/2014/05/27/ebay-data-breach-highlights-growing-need-for-personal-data-security

Leave it to Google to have an engineer so brainy he hacks out machine learning models in his 20 percent time. Google says that recently it’s been using machine learning — developed by data center engineer Jim Gao (his Googler nickname is “Boy Genius”) — to predict the energy efficiency of their global data centers down to 99.6 percent accuracy, and then to optimize the data centers in incremental ways if they become less efficient for whatever reason. Part of Gao’s day-to-day job at Google is to track its data centers’ power usage efficiency, or PUE, which demonstrates how efficiently data center computing equipment is using energy. Traditionally many data center operators were seeing about half of their energy consumed by cooling equipment, but in recent years data center leaders like Google, Facebook and others have focused on tools like using the outside air for cooling, or running the server rooms at warmer temperatures, to dramatically cut energy use. You can read more at http://gigaom.com/2014/05/28/google-is-harnessing-machine-learning-to-cut-data-center-energy/

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