Digital privacy: Us and Them

Kieran Chakravorty

Digital privacy is one of the most important things to us here at Invicta Linux, not only as a business but as individuals. The more recent digital revolution has brought many changes and challenges, but we’re finally starting to see the road ahead. I believe most people have an increased awareness of what they are giving away for free.

Let’s first talk about AI. It’s been terrible for user privacy. The creators of these engines have, broadly speaking, fed everything into these machines for free, with the aim of profiting from it. People may not be aware of Open AI’s ditching of its not-for-profit label, but this was an inevitability. AI, and your data that it uses, will be the backbone of our lives, including the media we see and how we interact with it, where and how we shop and even how employable we are. If you don’t like that, don’t put your most valuable information online.

Next, let’s look at data leaks. Last year was quite a year, but here are just a few.

  1. MoD, May. Personal information about military personnel was leaked. In fairness this doesn’t seem to have been a direct attack, but an attack on a third party payroll system. These third party attacks are some of the most common, so when you trust businesses with your data you have to also trust every single company they deal with.
  2. Columbus, Ohio, July. In short this was a hack by a group called Rhysida and the city attempted to cover up just how bad it was. This included the theft of social security numbers. Governing bodies often use a ‘the cheapest wins’ tendering tactic, and security is expensive, so I doubt this surprises many.
  3. Roku, April. Hackers got a list of unrelated, leaked passwords and tried them on other services. Roku was one of the ones hit and, while the damage to accounts was minimal, it’s still why you should use unique passwords for every service – and keep them in a password manager.
  4. National Public Data, April. Not sure exactly what was stolen or how, the reporting is a little wild. This is only listed here for one reason, after two decades serving the data industry, the NPD filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a direct result of the breach. Go to their Wikipedia page. I really don’t want that to be my legacy.

If you run a business of any size and you aren’t overly concerned about security, think again. As you can see, it can end your company, and a cover-up won’t work. If you have high-profile clients or vendors with whom you work closely, that makes you an extremely high-value target. For us as consumers, we rely on companies like Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft when we store critical information online for convenience. We, as users and businesses, rely on companies we share our data with to keep it safe, assuming they will handle it responsibly, when in fact they may not have a strong legal obligation or strong enough measures in place to do so.

We also need to give a brief nod to quantum computing here, which will become an entire blog, or a series of blogs, on its own. In short, the digital ecosystem as it stands relies pretty heavily on encryption. This will become obsolete with the arrival of quantum computers as all encryption becomes meaningless. Some say it’s less than a decade away, and I’m really excited to see what the actual tech geniuses come up with to keep data secure.

Privacy is a one-way street. Once you give information away, or sell it, it can never be reclaimed. Breaches happen, and will continue to happen.

The two most dangerous thoughts are, ‘I use this company because they’ll never get hacked’ and ‘it’ll never happen to me’. It will. Be proactive and vigilant.

Important links

EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation. Defenders of civil liberties in the digital world.

Haveibeenpwned – Are your details compromised?

Hannah Fry on quantum computing

GDPR fines total €1.2bn in 2024