Data theft and accepting that you are ‘the product’

On April 3, a cybersecurity specialist called Alon Gal tweeted that a data leak at Facebook in 2019 had made 533 million personal records available online. The data was on sale on the “Dark Web” for a while, but it is now available for free. The tweet included a list of countries and detailed numbers of leaked records. The number from Jordan is 3,105,988 so we can assume that it includes all of us.اضافة اعلان

A closer look at screenshots in the tweet shows the information may include names, birth dates, email addresses, locations, gender, relationship status, Facebook IDs, and phone numbers. Since our Facebook info could also include “bio” information, there may also be data about our job, school, or workplace.

Facebook says it has since fixed the vulnerabilities that hackers exposed two years ago, but this is such a huge “data dump” that it covers 106 countries and includes the personal information of leading figures worldwide, one of whom is the Facebook founder himself, Mark Zuckerberg!

This incident was not the first, it won’t be the last and you can rest assured that the current arrangement of willingly giving away our personal data to digital platforms in exchange for the free services they offer will continue because it’s just so convenient and addictive to do so.

Are you psychologically ready to delete your Facebook account and accept that you never actually had 2,000 friends? Can you live without the addiction of scrolling through Instagram to keep an eye on the successes, failures, and silliness of the people you know? Would you risk the “professional damage” of closing your LinkedIn account?

The answer to all the above is NO and the giants of the Internet age, non-affectionately referred to as “Big Tech”, know this and have accordingly built their business model around the simple fact that you are the product which they are selling!

“Big Tech” is now a “Big Target” for hackers and data thieves and this never ending battle will inevitably result in many incidents of stolen data. In the past week, we’ve had two other incidents.

Jordanians who own an iPhone, probably less than 10 percent of the population, love Clubhouse and can’t get enough of it. Now they can look forward to being the target of phishing schemes, because it is reported that the personal data of 1.3 million Clubhouse users has leaked online. The data includes names, social media profile names, and other details. Not much is known about this data breach, and Clubhouse has not yet commented.

LinkedIn has not been immune to data theft, and the company is unfortunately in the news this week because hackers “scraped data from 500million LinkedIn users”. That is two-thirds of the platform's user base! These are valuable business profiles with sought-after contact information. So one must expect the next part of this grim announcement that “the data has been posted for sale online”. This data includes account IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, genders, and links to other social media accounts.

Although my business life started 12 years before LinkedIn was created and was going fine, I cannot now imagine going through a business day without it! It is too useful to ignore, and frankly worth the risk of my personal information and content leaking every once in a while!

I am admitting that, as a digital citizen of the twenty-first century, I know what I am getting into and am “tacitly consenting” to the possibility of my social media and business profile data ending up as a product that is bought and sold somewhere in the so-called “criminal underbelly of the internet”. It is a sad situation indeed that we have to accept that “with great service comes bad security”.

Governments across the world are angry and not willing to accept this, and are legally pursuing these large digital platforms to be broken up into smaller companies or regulated to change their business models to require less information and become more secure. It will be a long fight.

In the meantime, what other choice do I and billions of users worldwide have? Disconnection, withdrawal from digital life and abandoning the now essential tools of the world economy? These are not viable options. That’s why we all are and will continue to be willing beneficiaries and prisoners of “big data”.