A big thank you to those who attended our great debate on digital security.  You all seemed really engaged and the questions showed the topic hit a nerve.  

As you know the event was hosted by putitout at Boldrocket with a panel consisting of Simon Rockman of The Register, Ed Hodges of InAuth, Charles Cadbury of putitout and moderated by Ivana Farthing of Diffusion PR.

The morning started off with a lively discussion around whether marketers were doing enough to help manage consumers concerns with mobile privacy and what businesses were doing to address these concerns. 

Ed Hodges didn’t hold back with a stance that “no body cares” referring to the little interest shown by the public on what data is being collected and what is done with it. He pointed out the rise of social media demonstrates this and consumers are very flippant with the information they choose to share - not just between their friends but across the entire internet.

Simon was quick to point out that consumers did care about their data if they had visibility on the how much corporates actually knew about them.  

The proportion of people who did care understood (how corporates manipulate) the repercussions of what could happen if their data ended up in the wrong hands.  People don’t have much of a choice and are prepared to sacrifice privacy for utility and this would only change with more media coverage.  

Charlie pushed the question of where people do start to care and that possibly when an individual's analogue life was snooped upon they would take offence with particular reference to phone hacking.

On the subject of who is ensuring our data is not abused it falls to the dater harvester to 'do no evil' a corporate to be ethically sound and the individual to read the small print before they press 'I agree'.  All of these are going to be hard to police or raise awareness of. 

Quote of the session was in response to what the whistleblower Edward Snowden had taught us:

'It reminded us all that spies spy, always have, always will.'

The  amount you care about that fact and who the 'spies' are should shape your personal responsibility towards your data's security.  How would you feel if you were used in a large scale experiment, like Facebook recently did with it's users?

For the Twitter action from the event checkout #pitoevent

And of course do give us a shout if you, or any colleagues, want to know any more on digital security. We have more exciting events coming up so please stay in touch if you'd like to come along.