On Thursday, August 1, students in CIBU’s Global Broadcast, Print, and Social Media Marketing class were treated to an extremely timely and thought-provoking speech by guest speaker and UK expert on Privacy, Lesley Tadgell-Foster. Ms.Tadgell-Foster is Managing Director at Shelfline Promotional Consultancy LTD and is also a Lead Professor at both Regents College London and Bournemouth University.
Ms.Tadgell-Foster shared with us some of the largest data breaches in the past few years. In one of the largest data losses in UK history, HM Revenue & Customs lost 2 CD’s containing child benefit records for 25 million people, including the bank records for 7.25 million families. In 2011, Sony lost 100 million names which cost them millions, not to mention their reputation. She shared T-Mobile’s call center employee data theft, in which employees sold millions of customer records to data brokers. All of these stories have led wary consumers to ask the all important question: Can I trust you with my data?
With newspaper headlines such as “Every click you make, every call you take, they’ll be watching you” and the founder of Facebook proclaiming that Privacy is dead, Ms.Tadgell-Foster agrees that privacy is dead and that people’s confidence in data has tanked. She also believes that we may see some consumer backlash in response to big data. Her engaging speech left us thinking about our daily online/mobile data activities and interactions and their impact on our privacy.