Having recently retired from a 30 year career in Policing I currently witness via the media, numerous reports on the misuse of data and the violation of an individual or members of the public’s privacy rights. Sadly this has been an ongoing issue ever since I can remember receiving my first mobile phone records (1990) of an individual I was investigating with regards a theft case. Never would I have considered this would still be a cause for concern, some 28 years later but unfortunately it clearly has become a major factor in how the world has become a data driven environment with the advance of internet availability and the rise of social media. The phone record paper print out has long been superseded by the electronic data record.

So back to the modern day and I believe the Internet has become the largest data storage medium, it provides information on almost any subject matter. We as human beings have contributed to this increased data base freely providing all kinds of information about our lives and movements to relatives, friends and of course strangers. Currently a large proportion of the data can be freely seen, read and viewed by simple searches conducted on social media sites and search engines and it appears that we are only now beginning to realize this is happening, but is it too late? No I don’t think so!

We as Homo sapiens now need to evolve and develop like early man leaving the cave and discovering fire! We can easily function in the technology world when we fully grasp the concept of…. Would we visit our local coffee shop and start writing about our personal lives on bits of sticky pads, then stick on notice boards around the coffee house for everybody to read? No, then the same simple analogy should be applied to posting on social media sites.

Here ends this lesson

Open Source Researcher @ www.oskaresearch.com