Personal Data Security
Written by Dzaki Al-Farid
Disclaimer: This paper is an opinion article without scientific study which is the personal opinion of the author, not a reflection of the attitudes or opinions of any agency and organization.
Are you sure your data is currently safe? Maybe after you read this article you started worrying about how your data is managed. Because if you don’t, you are the right target.
When you create an account on social media or other platforms, you are given several statements regarding data management in using that media. Each digital platform has its terms & conditions, and everyone is given the choice to agree or disagree with them. Have you been considering it all this time?
2020, the year when the digital system is increasingly sophisticated and makes it very easy for the lives of all people in the world. With the smartphone that you have, you can talk with your lover for hours, order food that is out of your reach, even you can buy your underwear via your smartphone easily. But is it easier for all things to happen? I don’t think so, because there are people who don’t use it wisely.
The difficulty of competition in the world, including politics, economics, culture, and others, causes various parties to do dirty ways to win something they want. Without thinking about the impact, some parties take advantage of the lack of supervision by several parties regarding the management of personal data. The rise of data leakage is one of the gaps of destruction for some parties. With digital media being part of the lives of all human beings, it has become a means of crime for those who understand this field. Many parties who seek an advantage in some way, such as stealing people’s data to be used for personal gain.
When opening the Youtube application, are you looking for the video that you want to watch, or are you just watching what appears on the Youtube start page? Maybe you never realized it, you only choose videos that you think are interesting but don’t know about the origin of the video appearing on your timeline. Youtube has an algorithm that studies data resulting from livelihoods, videos watched, even videos that have links to videos that have been watched before. These data are used to map the patterns of the users of the media so that the media can present videos that might interest us. This is very dangerous for someone’s life. Our data and all people on this earth have been collected in a storage place so that at any time it can be used for various purposes without the consent of the owner of the data.
The sheer volume of data that has been created and stored at a global level is to this day unimaginable. The data continue to grow endlessly. Thus, Big Data has a high potential to collect important information and is also the key to success in determining business strategy. In processing internal and external data, an institution can take data from various axes to be exploited for profit in business. When an institution\organization can combine a large amount of data it has with powerful analysis, it can complete several tasks related to its business such as in the controversial USA Donald Trump presidential election campaign.
The case of data leakage in the world, Trump’s victory in the United States Presidential Election.
Donald Trump was elected as President of the US through the Republic Party on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. He won 276 electoral votes, beating the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who won 218 electoral votes. After some time during the administration of Donald Trump, there have been several issues regarding data leaks being exploited in the US presidential election. This was even featured in a documentary film entitled “The Great Hack”.
The Great Hack is a documentary film about the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The film, which was released on Netflix in July 2019, is the work of Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer. This documentary focuses on Professor David Carroll of the Parsons School of Design, Brittany Kaiser (former director of business development for Cambridge Analytica), and British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr.
Cambridge Analytica, the company responsible for the scandal, has big data expertise. The data collected is used as part of a massive campaign creation strategy targeting individual users. The outcome of this campaign ultimately disrupted US and UK politics to the point that it led to claims of involvement by social media companies such as Facebook.
Cambridge Analytica’s illegal collection of personal data was first reported in December 2015 by Harry Davies, a journalist for The Guardian. He reports that Cambridge Analytica works for the United States Senator Ted Cruz and uses data taken from millions of people’s Facebook accounts without their consent. Facebook declined to comment on the report other than saying it was investigating it. Subsequent reports that review Cambridge Analytica is the Swiss publication Das Magazin by Hannes Grasseger and Mikael Krogerus in December 2016, Carole Cadwalladr at The Guardian (starting February 2017) and Mattathias Schwartz at The Intercept (March 2017). Brittany Kaiser, former director of Business Development at Cambridge Analytica, says that everything published involving Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit campaign and the Ted Cruz campaign is correct.
The leaked Facebook user data was used by Cambridge Analytica to map the characteristics of voters in the 2016 US presidential election that won Donald Trump. The leaked personal data of Facebook users also have the potential to be used for political purposes. Reflecting on the case of Facebook user data leaks in the United States. The personal data of more than 50 million users of the social media application made by Mark Zuckerberg was leaked to third parties for various purposes. There were 1,096,666 personal data of the leaked Facebook account owners in Indonesia.
Leaking cases in Indonesia, Leaking of Tokopedia user data.
One of the new startups in Indonesia, Tokopedia, experienced a data leak in early May, leaving most of its user data vulnerable to abuse. A total of 91 million personal data is traded on dark web sites for $ 5,000 or the equivalent of 72 million rupiahs. The leaking of data includes full name, hash password, email, telephone number, gender, and date of birth.
Starting from this personal data, some people can use it for their gain. Capitalizing on population profiling for political needs, deciding on advertising targets on social media, even cybercrime with social engineering techniques combined with malware (software to carry out criminal acts), phishing, to SIM swaps. Crimes with personal data have occurred in government institutions, where this case has stolen personal data: the leakage of 1.3 million Ministry of Education and Culture employee data containing Identity Number, Family Card number, full name, date of birth, address, and full names of parents. How is the government responding to this problem?
Leaking data on Tokopedia and Kemendikbud users are just a few of the existing leakage cases. Unfortunately, the government seems not serious in responding to this problem. The government has instead focused more on using personal data for its interests. Poor handling from the government can be seen in the case of leakage of startup companies, so it can be assessed the performance of a stupid government that just accepts reports from companies without following up on the truth of the report.
By knowing some of the cases above and how the regulations work in government. It can be seen from the government side that handled these cases cannot be 100% judged that their work was negligent. Even though the government has done its best for the interests of the country, the people have not also helped in the implementation process, this is futile and will happen again. As a society, we can help by being more aware of using the media. Because there are still many people who still underestimate this, but when this problem occurs it creates hoax news and spreads this news in a distorted direction. Start thinking about your surroundings, you have a very big influence on your environment!
At least if you are lazy in reading the Terms & Agreement of an application because it is so long, think again how to place your data on any social media. Because maybe, you are being watched!
