Data Security: "It's a Really Important Factor"

Following is a little article I wrote up back in 2018 for my college magazine. I was 16/17 and stupid, today kids are busy raising millions for startup but I was just figuring out coding, ego-fighting with friends and trying to get a girl out of pure FOMO and status back in college.
So yeah this blog has a lot of grammar mistakes, but I intend to keep it as is because it would be fun to read this later and hey in todays world where everything is heavily moderated using AI tools, its good to have some raw unedited content too. hehe.

The collection of Data

Every industry working on a technology called Artificial Intelligence, Improving User Experience is on the path of collecting large amounts data about the user using their products. How much Data? E.g. The Google Assistant in our phone collects our daily usage patterns to give us a friendlier experience. The Google’s Android 9.0 Pie collects our daily usage patterns to sort out tasks on CPU according to the preference level of the user. The most famous Microsoft Windows 10 OS also had written in their User Agreement about collection of data of the users using their official Windows 10 OS which many didn’t care about reading it and then tried to file cases on Microsoft saying illegally data collection.

Nearly ½ of the apps on the Windows, Android, iOS App Stores collects user information. There is an ongoing race between the tech giants about who collects more Data. The one having more Data is always the winner in the Race. It’s like by 2025 every second a user creates 2.2 GB of Data. This data could be Images, Videos and Documents. This large amount of data comes from different sources – messages on Face Book and other social media services, Data from the wearable’s and from our dear connected IoT devices…

Bank details and every important sensitive document stored in different government servers are an example of Data.

The Data Privacy

What if one day your digital personal assistant starts calling your pet name and also does business transactions for you without even asking you your bank details. The work here became easy but wasn’t that creepy. There was a joke when a man makes a call to the pizza man and asks for a pizza and says that he would pay when the pizza gets delivered, then the pizza man says to him that doesn’t trust that way cause the man who ordered the pizza had already taken a loan last month and his health was poor had already taken pills for the sickness. You see the man only gave a phone call the pizza center and the pizza center collected the phone number and the man’s voice to find who it really was on the line and fetched every detail about him, and found out that it was not safe to give him a pizza as his current health conditions were bad. During the whole conversation the man was totally on fire as the pizza man knew every detail about him. This is the future soon anyone with an internet access can fetch anyone’s information.

Do you know the Gods Eye from the Fast and Furious movie, this small gadget called Gods Eye could find information of every man living? As this gadget had hacked into every database and cameras on the earth to get an accurate result of one whom you were searching for. You could identify every one captured in the traffic cameras. And this will soon become a reality. That sounds Scary sometimes

There are thousands of Cyber Criminals those who could even kill a human without even touching him but just his personal Data. He could know where you are at any time. Scientists could track a man’s Smartphone accurately in New York even when the phones GPS was switched off. There are unknown apps on your phone which could just switch on your cameras and stream the footage live to someone else’s computer. I had done a small experiment by integrating a payload into the most famous game PUBG’s apk and the antivirus couldn’t even detect it but I could read, send, call, watch and do anything possible with the phone even restart it.

The Data Security: A real long living job

The only job that will live as long as someone cares about his or her Data is Data Security. That’s really important. Some years back a Student just doing second year Computer Engineering challenged some SBI bank that he could hack the current security system, the bank offered him a cash prize of Rs. 2,00,000 to break the current security. He proved his hacking skills there, he hacked into the security system. Then he was asked to find a solution for this. He was further called by many other banks to find the loop holes in the security system and then find a solution for it.

In the near future you find 2 - 4 Data Security expert’s in every bank. See how important is some Data. Every year someone or the other hacks into some tech giant’s server and leaks TB’s of confidential information. It would be a nightmare when someone knows what you did during last year’s vacations better than you. So, if someone wants a job in which they could stay for a long time then its Data Security because many other fantastic technologies come and go over years.

[Alphons Jaimon - 2018]