Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: privacy

  • Staying healthy with Big Data

    Staying healthy with Big Data

    US medical centre chain Carolinas HealthCare has started mining patients’ credit card data to predict health outcomes reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

    The idea is that by looking at credit information and purchasing records, doctors can anticipate what ailments their patients will present with.

    Carolinas Healthcare’s matching of spending patterns to healthy is an obvious application of Big Data which illustrates some of the benefits that mining information can deliver for individuals and the community.

    Should the project overcome patients’ valid privacy concerns, this is the sort of application that is going to be increasingly common as organisations figure out how to apply software to their mountains of information.

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  • Insurers and the internet of things

    Insurers and the internet of things

    Earlier this week, Microsoft Ventures announced a partnership with American Family Insurance in an accelerator for home automation services.

    The insurance industry has an obvious interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) as constant monitoring allows them to make more accurate assessments of risk and quickly adjust policies or premiums when circumstances change.

    “We are focused on helping early stage companies bring new products and services to market that can make our policyholders’ homes and lives safer,” Microsoft’s media release quotes Dan Reed, American Family Ventures’ Managing Director as saying.

    For consumers and the public at large, there a serious implications of constant monitoring by insurance companies, marketers and government agencies.

    As Business Insider points out, Google already holds a massive amount of data on us all with Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft not far behind.

    One of the key questions of the next decade is ‘do we we want our smart smoke detectors spying on us?’ and, if so, do we want it giving that data straight to the insurance company?

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  • The online security pains of a growing business

    The online security pains of a growing business

    Possibly the most embarrassing of the outbreak of computer hacks in late 2011 was the breaching of prominent geopolitical analysts Strategic Consulting, also known as Stratfor.

    The Daily Dot dissects what went wrong for Stratfor based on a leaked report from Verizon Business who carried out a “forensic investigation” of the hack which the company claims cost them $3.8 million in damages.

    While the monetary damages were substantial for a relatively small company, Stratfor’s reputation was probably the greatest casualty as customers’ credit card details were exposed and the firm’s confidential files were distributed by Wikileaks.

    The tragic thing is that none of this would have happened had Stratfor followed basic IT security practices, something that every business should be following.

    Don’t store credit card details

    Probably Stratfor’s biggest mistake was storing customers’ credit card details – there is no reason for saving your clients’ payment details. Ever.

    If you’re accepting credit cards, organise a payment service to handle that work for you as they know what they are doing and take most of the management hassles, security and fraud risks.

    In most cases, these companies’ fees are no more than manual processing fees that Stratfor and most businesses manually processing payments get hit with anyway.

    Password policies

    Another basic mistake was that passwords were shared and kept simple; there is no excuse for giving staff the same password to access confidential or critical files and systems.

    Similarly, there wasn’t a ‘need to know’ policy; that is, that an analyst has no reason to have access to HR files and the receptionist no need to be looking at sales figures. Sensitive data should only be accessible to those who need it for their day-to-day work.

    Remarkably, Stratfor didn’t have any properly configured firewalls and on many computers didn’t have up to data anti-virus protection. All of this made it easy for hackers to get into the network and access confidential information.

    The online pains of growing a business

    In some respects it’s possible to feel sorry for Stratfor’s management, the report is a classic example of a business that outgrew the IT structure for a one or two person operation founded by men who didn’t understand the risks of the internet.

    Today there’s no excuse not to have systems locked down or to lack a company culture that recognises data security as being essential in the modern business world.

    Stratfor’s hack was a spectacular example of what could go wrong, but it’s a warning for all businesses about the importance of security in a connected world.

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  • Building an internet we’re not ashamed of

    Building an internet we’re not ashamed of

    Late last month writer, painter and software developer Maciej Ceglowski spoke at the design and technology conference, Beyond Tallerand in Dusseldorf.

    The Internet with a Human Face is his closing keynote for the conference – let’s try to kill that kill that awful term ‘locknote’ for closing presentations – and is a wonderful overview of the unintended consequences of the internet we’re now seeing emerge.

    Maciej compares the internet’s effects with that of the motor car in the Twentieth Century – the rise of the automobile totally changed society in ways our great grandparents couldn’t have expected.

    Unexpected consequences

    In many respects the changes were positive; the age of the motor car saw massive increases in living standards through the second half of the century. However the immediate downside of those efficient supply chains were equally massive increases in obesity rates, suburban alienation and urban sprawl.

    A similar thing is happening with this wave of technological changes; as Maciej describes in our presentation, our views of how the web was going to evolve is turning out to be very different to what we expected.

    One great example is in small business advertising where we expected online channels would democratise marketing. Instead the exact opposite has happened.

    Maciej’s view is far broader than just the relatively trivial problem of small business advertising, particularly with the ‘Internet never forgetting’ with the concentration of the industry in one of the world’s great earthquake zones as another major risk.

    Building an internet we’re not ashamed of

    Ultimately, though Maciej sees the problems facing the internet industry as a design problem.

    “I have no idea how to fix it. I’m hoping you’ll tell me how to fix it. But we should do something to fix it. We can try a hundred different things. You people are designers; treat it as a design problem! How do we change this industry to make it wonderful again? How do we build an Internet we’re not ashamed of?”

    While being ashamed is a big call, and probably unfair in that it’s like blaming Henry Ford for 2014 childhood obesity rates in Minnesota, Maciej has flagged that there are real adverse unintended consequences to the way the internet is evolving.

    All of us involved in the industry need to recognise those adverse effects and start acting to fix these problems.

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  • ABC Nightlife – security, dropping off the grid and 4D printing

    ABC Nightlife – security, dropping off the grid and 4D printing

    Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife across Australia from 10pm Australian Eastern time tonight to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

    For the May 2014 spot we looked at computer security, specifically Apple ransomware and The Heartbleed bug along with dropping off the grid, 4D printing and the future of design.

    To protect from the Oleg Pliss ransomware – or any similar problems – have a strong password, enable the screen passkey and enable two factor authentication.

    Join us

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

    Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

    You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

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