Often companies and individuals who are in the public eye
are targeted on the Internet.
Throughout the 2000s I was a fixture on UK television.
Thankfully I haven't fallen victim
to my personal or professional data being hacked or leaked,
but what if I had?
I'm going to meet three experts
who specialise in taking control back when the worst happens.
I'm travelling to Romania to speak with Mario Gonzales.
He was in a legal battle for a decade with Google, and in the end,
he was successful in his quest to remove a document from their index
that compromised his reputation.
In doing so, he helped to herald in a new statutory right
that's been exercised by over 200,000 European citizens -
the right to be forgotten.
Why was getting your data removed from the search engine
such a significant battle for you?
It was important as a matter of principle.
I thought, "Why should my personal data be out there?
"I don't want it to be."
This new law allows us to remove data
that is incorrect or harmful to individuals from search engines.
One of the problems with your case
is because you took Google to court to get rid of the information
that information is the first thing that comes up on your Wikipedia page.
It's a paradox.
Yes, it's a paradox.
At this moment it is practically impossible
to completely remove something from the Internet.
But the multiplying effect of a search engine is very important.
I'm meeting with Alastair, who works with businesses
advising them on managing their online reputations in Data Shadows.
Will the situation for companies be similar
when they find undesirable material has been leaked online?
When you've published something online, you've lost control of it.
Be conscious that if you put something on the Internet,
there's no guarantee that it stays secure and under your control.
Companies need to have some sort of incident-handling plan
to know when something does occur, and it will,
how they are going to respond to that so it isn't a panic in the business.
Many companies have moved to adopt the new technologies
because they bring business benefit, but they've not thought about the risks.
How do you ensure that information doesn't make you vulnerable?
It really depends where the data is,
so if it's linked through somewhere like Google, Twitter, Facebook,
there are removable procedures you can go through.
But if your data is on a Russian hacker site somewhere,
they're unlikely to respond to a take-down request.
The best you can do is try to mitigate the consequences.
So, for businesses and individuals, once the information is out,
it seems nearly impossible to take back control of it.
Since the earliest days of human communication,
we quickly learn the importance of confidentiality.
It's been good business.
3,000 years ago in the Middle East potters used cryptography
to keep their glaze formula secret from competitors.
Particularly during conflict.
Protecting correspondence has always been of the utmost importance.
But it wasn't just military and business information we sought to protect.
In 400 BC the writers of the Kama Sutra
recommended that lovers encrypt their messages
to keep them from prying eyes.
Now in the 21st century
we're exchanging more business and personal information
than ever before,
though we've relinquished control of this data
to governments and corporations.
Often instead of safekeeping this material,
we've found that they're exploiting it.
To learn about preventative techniques I'm travelling to Berlin
to meet with Stephanie Hankey from Tactical Technology.
Their organisation works to provide tips, tools and techniques
for individuals, like journalists and activists
whose lives depend upon retaining control of their digital activities.
If you're interviewing people,
it may be as important that somebody from the outside
can't see who you're talking to.
A phone call that we might have, we might think it needs to be encrypted,
so people don't know what we're talking about.
Very often what's more important is that we're having a conversation,
but also we talked last week and that today we talked for an hour.
That's metadata.
What other forms of data might be collected about me?
In a city, for the phone to know where you are, to look at a map,
you have to have location data on.
If you look on your iPhone, in the System Services section...
Lo and behold, down, somewhere buried in the menu.
There's a "frequent locations".
Most people are surprised. It gives an overview of something.
It guesses what your home is.
When you start to look at the patterns,
you see things like probably when you come into the house after work,
when you leave in the morning.
What you can do is switch off Location Services.
So what are companies doing with this metadata?
These companies are not yet transparent about it.
Some is profiling and advertising. Some of it has gone much further.
For example, LinkedIn is using their large-scale analysis of the data
to advise governments and that becomes complicated.
People are not thinking they're contributing to that.
Personal data is the oil of the 21st century.
All technological companies are gathering and using data
as they know it is now essential to their business.
But what happens if this data was accessible for us all to use,
rather than just a handful of companies?
In the next episode, I'll dive into open data to show the power
of digital collaboration.