By monitoring our every movement hundreds of thousands of times a day, our smartphones, the websites we use and CCTV cameras are harvesting priceless information about our lives – and much of it is stored in China. It is a chilling thought.
A cybersecurity firm showed last week how the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok has software that can gain access to our innermost secrets. It’s the latest and most worrying example of how technology tracks us 24 hours a day, presenting a colossal threat to our civil liberties and national security.
It’s impossible to know how your data is being used. And it’s just as difficult to try to work out how much big business is making out of it all.
Digital expert Johnny Ryan said: ‘It’s a free-for-all, and the numbers are insane. What everyone is reading, watching and listening to, even where they’re standing, is being broadcast everywhere, all the time.
‘We don’t know who is receiving it and we can never find out. Once your data has been sold, it’s gone. We have no idea who is getting it today or where it is going tomorrow.’
Cybersecurity expert Daniel Card said: ‘What happens when your data leaves is a black hole. It’s unfathomable. For an average person, their data could be harvested hundreds of times a day. For someone like yourself, whose life is wedded to the digital world, it could be hundreds of thousands of times.’
One survey estimated that internet companies earned an average of $202 per American internet user in 2018 from personal data – and that was a conservative figure.
Google’s ad revenue shows that in 2001 the average person’s data was worth about £1.45. Within two decades that had jumped to £26 – and it’s rising fast.
While all smart devices connected to the internet pose a privacy risk, security expert Daniel Card particularly warns against those with microphones or cameras: ‘To be smart about your privacy, it’s better to have a stupid home.’
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