We live in the age of surveillance capitalism. As our lives and societies merge with the digital world, it has never been more important to protect ourselves from corporate and government intrusion. But can we?
As our lives have migrated to the digital realm, data collated from our computers, phones and other devices have come to represent a profound and serious threat to privacy. Only four spatio-temporal points are enough to identify 90% of people from a credit card database of one million individuals, or 95% of people from a mobile phone database of one and a half million. Faced with the threat of massive, systemic privacy violations, is there anything we as individuals can do to protect ourselves?
Imperial College computer scientist Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is the world’s leading thinker on the impact of big data on the privacy of the individual. His work has featured in The New York Times, BBC News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and many more of the world’s most prestigious media; he’s advised EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, the UN and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In this conversation with Eleanor O’Keeffe, Editorial Director of CogX, Europe’s leading AI and breakthrough technology conference, Yves will reveal his insights into the present and future of anonymity online. Is big data ultimately a pernicious threat to human liberty, or can it become a force for good that allows us to understand large-scale human behaviour like never before?
