The internet has turned into a massive social experiment in which unknown people know pretty much everything there is to know about you and other people.
That's the view of IT security veteran Mikko Hyppönen who was in Auckland last week to talk about privacy.
I think he has a point: just looking at what happened the last few days, the amount of privacy concerns that popped up is quite astounding.
There's the Anthem health insurance data breach that saw eighty million records leaked - and the people in the records are being targetted by scammers now.
Samsung decided that it was a good idea to let its smart TVs record and transmit what customers say in front of it, something I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody would willingly give the Korean company permission to do.
Buy a new-ish car and it might be recording how you drive, when you do it, where you go and how often; and then send that data to the car maker and third parties, all without telling you (or doing it in a hacker-proof manner).
Smartphones are the first things police go for during investigations because they will reveal absolutely masses about people. They're so useful in fact that law enforcement in the United States cried foul when Apple and Google decided to not keep encryption keys to phones, meaning even if they get a warrant to search them, only the device owner can open it.
Mikko freely admitted that this was something he did not foresee, and I think that's true for everyone. Maybe Google and Facebook imagined that they would store lots of personal data and perhaps too realised that this would become a juicy target for hackers.
Mikko Hyppönen to the left with an admirer from Coatesville.
That governments too are keen to mine the data of people everywhere was probably a surprise to the tech giants. I also don't think they expected to be duking it out with governments in order to defend their users' privacy. Without user privacy, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo et al have no business because who would trust them with their data? Nobody.
It will be interesting to see how the privacy battle plays out this year. Mikko believes there is a case for law enforcement and intelligence agencies in some situations having access to people's data - there is evil out there, after all.
However, it needs to be done with transparency and be part of a social contract. Not in secret, not things like UK's main spy agency testing facial recognition software by snagging lots of innocent people's private and often intimate webcam feeds and other acts that undermine not just the trust we're supposed to have in law enforcement but also threatens to hole the internet economy.
Open Data Day coming up
You can expect website scraping, data analysis tools talks and introduction to government application programming interfaces - or APIs as everyone says because it's easier.
Those things and more will happen at the Open Data Day on February 21, between 10am and 4pm. The event is part of the International Open Data Hackathon which will take place in many countries around the world.
What's more, Open Data Day is proudly hosted by the New Zealand Herald at the Albert Street headquarters in Auckland.
Heraldistas and data crunchers Caleb Tutty and Harkanwal Singh will be in attendance, so register here and make sure you bring a laptop or other computing device on the day.
