What will the privacy and security landscape look like in 2025?

A decade is a long time in the world of privacy. Facebook turned 10 last year and in the intervening years has prompted countless debates over privacy. Two years ago, the debate focused on government surveillance following the Snowden leaks, while in August we saw concern over the minutiae of Windows 10 privacy settings.

In other words, modern privacy is an ever-changing, wide-ranging thing. It’s impossible to know what the next 10 years hold for privacy, but companies looking to use the latest tech, recruit young staff and avoid legal issues must keep careful watch on the debate. Here are just a few of the key issues.

 

Tech and privacy

It’s no question that smartphones and social media have chipped away at privacy in our private and working lives, but will that worsen with the arrival of new technologies such as the internet of things, wearables and so on?

MEDIA AND TECH NETWORK

“Tech has changed the boundary of what’s private and what isn’t – between our personal and working lives – and from that comes issues of privacy,” says Susan Halford, professor of sociology at the University of Southampton. 

Take our working lives: already, smartphones are being used to track employees and there are reports of staff losing jobs as a result. One pest-removal operator was fired after his handset revealed he was skipping work to have an affair, while a sales woman in California was sacked for deleting a corporate trip-logging app after she realised that it was storing her location and sending it to her boss.

Of course, tracking staff could improve safety for those working off-site and boost productivity. Indeed, some data-collecting tools have been compared to the analytics that track high-end athletics off the pitch to improve their game-time performance. But will handing over your privacy to boost performance be common working practice in 2025?

“There’s a lot of talk about it right now, but a lot of it is hype. The devil will be in the actual working out of it,” says Halford. “You can well imagine conditions where you might see that it’s in your interest for your employer to know where you were – for personal safety, or threat of litigation – for there to be an external record of where you were and when.”

However, what remains to be answered is how useful all this data really is for companies. “There’s a lot of hype around big data and the workplace isn’t immune from that, but I do think they’re quite contested claims, in all kinds of ways,” she says. “There’s a lot more promise than there are solid examples falling out of this.” That’s before you include privacy complaints, she adds. Such challenges could mean that employees in the future refuse to strap corporate smartwatches to their wrists, or demand smart ID cards that don’t listen in on conversations, or company smartphones without tracking apps. With little evidence that such data necessarily works, employers may have to back down.

Teens of today, employees of tomorrow

Will such big data-collecting, performance-enhancing wizardry be welcomed by the next generation of workers? Those joining the workforce in 2025 are but teenagers now, and have grown up sharing everything, from pictures of their pets to their relationship status on social media.

 

Locking it down

Even if the next decade brings with it strong privacy laws, technological protection and individual savviness, we can’t have privacy without security. “Data protection becomes even more important in a more connected world,” says Walker. In a recent security report, Intel-owned McAfee looked back on five years of security, admitting it failed to predict some of the tactics cybercriminals would use, which is no surprise given how much has changed since 2010 in tech, such as the shift to mobile and the cloud.

The security firm believes that the next five years will see more subtle, sophisticated attacks that will be harder to detect and may last for many months as criminals and spies become more willing to play the long game. Mobile malware will also continue to grow. Intel also said that it’s just starting to see attacks against internet of things devices, suggesting that could be the next big target area for criminals.

Consumers still aren’t doing enough to protect their systems by failing to run updates and patches, using weak passwords, leaving hardware on default configurations and so on. The tech industry is looking for solutions, but as people are always the weakest link in any system, we need to take it more seriously. Criminals certainly do, with Intel noting that cyber crime is now a “full-fledged” industry, with suppliers, financing, business models and more.

For the time being, at least, consumers remain forgiving of firms that have been successfully attacked. Take the hack against extramarital affair site Ashley Madison: while the site faces a class-action action for failing to delete user data when it said it would, it’s also claimed an uptake in users. Few will have stopped using eBay, the Sony PlayStation Network, or any other site that’s been hacked, perhaps simply because so many are. Larger brands, however, may get more leeway on this than small and medium companies and start-ups that have yet to win customer loyalty.

Who will come out on top in this ongoing arms race between businesses and hackers? It’s not clear anyone will ever win. But one thing is clear: looking ahead to 2025, the more tech that is embedded into our lives, the larger the target is for hackers. If it’s impossible to perfectly protect a system, the best solution may well be data minimisation: collecting and storing less information. In other words, security is key for privacy, but privacy may well be key for security, too.

Read more at: http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/sep/07/privacy-security-landscape-2025