Data is the new oil of the future!!

Mahmoud Drira
3 min readMar 4, 2021

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the dramatic change from the industrial civilization to digital civilization gave birth to a new type of rights, the right to own our data, we used to fight for our real rights and human rights, a new battle is waiting for us which is the battle of strong data protection around the world, the data rights.

the data is any recorded information of a scientific or technical nature (product design or maintenance data, computer databases, and computer software documentation).

the paid apps, the subscription fee, or any virtual service we pay for have raised our awareness on why Facebook, Google, Instagram are still free or do they really have no cost? , actually, they tend to remain free because they do not need our dollars as users when they compromise our information in data breach deals with some political parties or huge media companies, our information is the product, so the answer is definitely a no, they cost our human dignity.

as users when we first open any link we display a thirst to log In without bothering ourselves reading the specific terms, hitting the agree button became our unconscious habit, and even if you take a while looking at the permissions you will figure out that it doesn’t make sense for a simple app like a calculator to request access to your contact list, well, such a request should be an eye-opener.

While logging into games, apps quizzes on Facebook ( I hope you will not regret playing any after reading this) we hit the accept permissions box without knowing what it has behind, actually all the information are being collected and sold without our permission to some specific data agencies who in turn went too far creating profiles “shadow profiles” for every person on earth, the profile contains any trace or hint the user left behind even while googling stuff, your likes, share and everything you type on your keyboard, those profiles are being sold with a very high price and by very we mean billions of dollars, this may sound like a new episode of black mirror so here is a real exemple to understand, when we search anything on Google we see adds related to that item on every other social platforms, of course that doesn’t come by accident but because who collected our information are using them to manpulate us by suggesting such adds, the suggestion can be for some political figure campaign or a civil momevment near to you, these data companies had built a very intelligent algorthim and a very powerful process of choosing the suggestions so they can target us, influence us, and reprogram our universal mind.

they are using our information against us, the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and the US presidential election in 2016, the Brexit affair, and multiple civil wars around the globe had put the social networks in hot water if wars could be won or lost on data then who owns data owns power, and that is why we should speak up and spread awareness about our stolen data and the importance to have a secured digital system, we have to assure a secure share of data so there will not be any third part collecting, analyzing and using our information under any purposes.

you are using the internet doesn’t mean you are exposed.

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