One thing that we don’t focus enough on when talking about Data from our seats in an academic institution, is the everyday sort of data, the kind generated when you use social media or collected when you use almost any web service, or the kind you consume every day reading the news.

There is now a huge industry built up around collecting and sharing your data, and for the most part, information on everything you do online is collected and often sold on from sources such as social media, online retail shopping sites, and cell phone providers. For example, this article about the “Insane Amount of Data We’re Using Every Minute”, says Twitter users send 473,400 tweets every minute and Amazon makes $332,876 per minute in net sales. Facebook is collecting user data and interests from your posts and likes. Insurance companies are using your personal data to make risk assessments and determine healthcare costs, and insurance rates.

Data is also part of our daily lives in many ways. The persistent claims of “fake news” and fake data” are in the news daily and require citizens to educate themselves to determine what is true or false. Cherry-picked data are often used to support claims by all types of media outlets, without consideration of bias. Statistics and numbers about healthcare costs, election polls and voter turnout, or unemployment numbers also proliferate across our news sources. Everyone needs to be data literate, which is the subject of tomorrow’s blog!

While this all sounds concerning, data can also be an entertaining and enriching part of life. Participating in citizen science activities such as bird watching and tracking through the iBird app can assist researchers and scientists while you are enjoying a hobby. The quantified self movement has been fueled by the availability and ease of tracking with mobile devices. There have also been great successes with crowd-sourcing, the BBC has used viewers of Stargazing Live to help process huge amounts of images from space and identified new solar systems, and the British Library had the Mechanical Curator project which crowdsourced image identification by getting members of the public to add tags to images.

Protect yourself online

Would you tell a complete stranger where you went last night? Would you give a stranger your address or the keys to your house? Would you send pictures of your children to just anyone? Obviously not! but every day, people give away this information on the web, whether they intend to or not.

When a web site or social network is asking you to provide personal information, make sure you know who will have access to this information, and how it will be used. If you aren’t comfortable, don’t do it!

• Always check privacy settings and security
• Be aware of who can benefit from your personal information
• Protect your identity
• Be aware of cookies
• Be careful what you say and show
• Check settings and security

Before you disclose any personal information, always make sure that you are using a secure site. A secure web site will display a padlock icon in the bottom right hand corner of your web browser on in the address bar.

Check the privacy statement of the site you’re using to see what you’re signing up and agreeing to (e.g. will they protect your details; do they take ownership of the information you put up there; do they enforce their privacy statement?)

Protect your identity, and remember that things posted can spread, as a rule; if you don’t want your boss to see it, don’t post it!

I always use this example of how much information can be easily accessed by not using the privacy settings properly on social media. The video is a few years old but it still makes a great point…