It's Data Privacy Day. Do you know where your data is?
As you're reading this, companies are collecting everything they can about you. Some groups want to do something about it.
You already know companies track your behavior in Web browsers and mobile apps, and soon they'll monitor you through your smart refrigerator and fitness band.
Yep, you're a walking, talking data source.
Despite the nagging sense that your information is constantly collected, few people know exactly what gets scooped up or what happens to it.
Harvard's Data Privacy Lab and software maker ForgeRock are among the groups and companies hoping to change that. Today, on Data Privacy Day, which is devoted to your right to control your data, they seek to point a way out of a seemingly sinister forest.
Could there be a sunny spot where we're not forced to choose between sacrificing our info or going without a desirable service? Yes, but apparently it will take a lot of effort to get there.
Data Privacy Lab director Latanya Sweeney said that right now the average person has no idea just how much personal data is bought and sold. That particularly applies to health care data, which gets anonymized -- supposedly -- and sold to a network that remains obscure.
"The purpose is kind of mysterious," said Sweeney, who is a former chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission.
Sweeney and her research team want to reveal who is sharing your info. Their project, "All the Places Personal Data Goes," aims to illustrate the path your personal info takes from one place to another. On Tuesday, the Knight Foundation awarded the project $440,000 to expand its efforts.
This means Sweeney's group will continue using public-records requests and other methods to gather information on data buyers and sellers and make it available to journalists and others. The project will also soon host a data-visualization competition to bring the issue to life.
The Data Privacy Lab has already proved that some "anonymous" health care data can actually be pieced together to identify patients. In 2013, the lab published an unsettling discovery, which drew on hospital discharge records collected by Washington state that detailed everything from a patient's age and gender to diagnoses and treatments.
Sweeney's team then found news stories about car accidents and other emergencies and used them to put names to the records. After the team released its findings, Washington state changed its anonymization process.
That's the effect Sweeney hopes to have on a larger scale: shine a light on data and promote changes to protect privacy. Though the project started with health care, it has since expanded to cover data from mobile phones.
"What we really want to be able to do is cover the full waterfront," Sweeney said.
Power to the people
Eve Maler, ForgeRock's vice president of innovation and emerging technology, said companies can decide to take the lead and actually help customers decide how their information gets shared.
In the 1990s, Maler co-invented XML, a popular coding system that lets software and online services exchange data automatically. Now she's pushing another system, one that lets Internet users control their personal data.
Called User-Managed Access (UMA), the protocol forms a backbone that programmers can build on to give us more choice when we use services. After helping develop the protocol, Maler joined ForgeRock to create a UMA-based product that companies can use in everyday services.
On Wednesday, San Francisco-based ForgeRock launched that product, Identity Platform. Philips, for one, is using it in health care products to help patients share health data with doctors and others on a limited and revocable basis.
ForgeRock has also worked with New Zealand's government to test a system that lets citizens safely choose to share with caregivers digitized records that help them obtain benefits.
The most important part of ForgeRock's system, Maler said, is the ability to opt in to, rather than out of, sharing data. If you want to send workout information from your smartwatch, for example, you should be able to hit a button that says "share," rather than wonder to whom your watch is relaying your health stats.
Other companies are also looking at using the UMA protocol to create tools for letting people decide what and when to share.
Of course, companies will continue mining and selling our personal data. Market researcher IDC predicts the Big Data industry, which collects all kinds of info including yours, will be worth $48.6 billion by 2019. But Maler said some companies actually want to give customers choice. There is some evidence to support this. Google, for instance, has introduced more-customizable privacy options for apps on phones that run its widespread Android operating system.
A sunny land where people control their own data? Sweeney, Maler and others have made that their cause. Too often, people must either accept that devices, services and apps are collecting data or just not use them.
"They're over a barrel," Maler said, "and that's not right.
Featured Video
Your next insurance agent will be a robot
Smarter machines mean more jobs are at risk of automation. Yours may be next.
A robot just gave your insurance agent a pink slip. Blame machine whisperer Snejina Zacharia.
Zacharia took aim at the $220 billion-a-year US auto insurance industry on Thursday when she launched Insurify. Technically, her Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup isn't an insurance company. Rather it helps you sort through the maze of competing companies, their premiums and those dizzying coverage plans. Think of it as Travelocity for auto insurance.
To do it, 39-year-old Zacharia uses a robot -- not the humanoid kind from sci-fi movies, but smart software instead. Still, watch out, Jake at State Farm and Flo at Progressive. Your replacement's name is Evia, short for "expert virtual insurance agent."
Snap a photo of your license plate, text it to Evia, which will ask you a few questions via text and then scour 82 insurance carriers' plans to find you the best one for the money.
"No one in the industry is doing that," says Insurify's Bulgaria-born founder and CEO, noting that the process happens in an "instant."
In other words, Evia is just like your old insurance agent, except she's faster, smarter and cheaper.
Silicon Valley has a few technological obsessions these days. Virtual reality is one. Big data is another. But none threatens to replace people's jobs like smart machines, or computer programs that can understand human language, sort through vast stores of data, make sense of patterns and even teach themselves.
To be sure, fears of machines taking our jobs are older than the cotton gin. Nearly every major technological development in the 222 years since its debut has come with predictions of mass unemployment. They were wrong (mostly). After all, the last two centuries of technological revolutions haven't been ones of continuously rising unemployment.
New tech has made a lot of jobs obsolete, though new careers have risen in their wake. Cars may have made the buggy whip maker unnecessary, but they also created the car mechanic.
This time might be different. Recent and rapid advances in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence look likely to replace, or at least radically change, careers once considered immune from automation.
"It's taking us to a jobless future," says Vivek Wadhwa, who oversees research in fields including robotics and artificial intelligence at Singularity University, a Silicon Valley think tank. "Over the next 10 to 15 years, I see major parts of the economy being wiped out."
Accountants have suffered serious incursions into their livelihoods by smart software. In 2014, 29 million people preferred to let Intuit's TurboTax do their taxes rather than a bean counter.
Driving will look very different soon enough. Investments into self-driving car technology by Google, GM, Tesla, Uber and others have some predicting that we won't just share the road with driving robots. Instead, human drivers could become a thing of the past.
Even lawyers can't avoid the changes. Law firms have already begun using algorithms to vet electronic documents like email messages for their relevance to a case.
Think creative gigs can't be automated? Think again. Ipsy's software picks outmakeup it feels you should be wearing. Another startup, Le Tote, chooses clothes for you. Last month, I received a pitch from Stylyze, a Seattle-based startup that says it has coded "the brain of an interior designer."
It's come to this: The BBC created a site last fall that lets you find out how soon your job will get taken over by a bot. Journalist ranks pretty low on the risk list, coming in at 285 out of 366 careers. Jobs like telephone sales people, typists, bookkeepers, bank and post office clerks are among the most likely to be automated out of existence.
Zacharia isn't all that worried by the trend. The former exec at market researcher Gartner said automation will simply make searching for the best deal on auto insurance a lot easier.
After a minor accident while finishing up graduate business school at MIT in 2013, Zacharia began looking for a better insurance plan when she saw her premium spike. She went online, searched sites and called a bunch of agents. She said she came away disgruntled and without an accurate apples-to-apples comparison of her options.
"The car insurance industry is worse off than where the travel industry was 10 years ago," she says. "The travel industry has an Expedia, a TripAdvisor and Travelocity."
Zacharia's company doesn't charge consumers to search for rates. Instead, it collects a commission when they choose an insurance company's plan. Insurify, she notes, is "not a lead-generation company" that has an incentive to steer consumers toward one plan over another.
She hopes Insurify, which has raised $2 million in seed funding, will help bring auto insurance up to speed. However, the tech she's bringing comes with costs and benefits.
"There might be a few Jakes that lose their jobs," Zacharia says, referring to State Farm's khaki-clad TV pitchman. "But there will be the few [remaining] who will just do 10 times the volume they're currently doing."
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