When do we start acting to protect our personal data?

Remember the robocall scandal way back in 2011? Also known as the voter suppression scandal, it grew from the federal election campaign held that year. There were allegations that Conservative campaign staff, mostly in the Guelph area, made robotic and in-person calls intended to suppress voting by providing misleading or confusing information to prospective voters.

There was a huge outcry, and even a protest in 2012 called the National Day Against Election Fraud.

It was a big deal, but the data mining scandal, in which unethically or illegally obtained personal data is collected from online sources and used to benefit politicians and parties, makes it seem downright quaint by comparison.

Data really is the new oil, just like prognosticators have been warning us for several years now. Just as companies that controlled the oil supply in years past ruled the world, those that collect, archive, synthesize and resell data are now kings of the hill.

There aren’t many. The five most valuable companies in the world today — Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet — have commodified data and taken over their respective sectors. Data equals knowledge, and knowledge equals power. But what happens when the corporate interests that monopolize our data don’t worry much about what it is used for?

Like, for example, the Trump election campaign machine, which used the data from more than 50 million Facebook accounts to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. It used U.K.-based Cambridge Analytica to do the dirty work. But of course, the people who provided that data, from whom it was arguably stolen, had no knowledge or anything to say about it.

This is only the most recent and egregious case. Barack Obama’s campaign relied on social media and data mining to predict the behaviour and preferences of potential voters. So did Justin Trudeau’s campaign team when he sought the Liberal leadership.

So using the powerful tools provided by data mining transcends political stripe. In fact, it’s a safe bet those tools are being employed right now as parties seek advantage in the upcoming provincial election.

What are we to do about all this? We, the sheep, blithely pass along the special sauce while we lead our day-to-day lives online — through social media, browsing, searching, buying and selling. Without that sauce — our preferences, predilections and behaviour — data mining has limited power. But with it, the people who store, buy and sell it, can change the world.

That’s why calls are growing for governments to get involved. In a recent survey, one in 10 respondents said they plan to kill their Facebook accounts, but beyond that sort of individual action, a much broader and focused response is needed. There are examples.

The European Union has its General Data Protection Regulation, which applies to “all companies processing the personal data” of EU residents. The rules require those companies to be transparent about the data they collect and how it could be used.

That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s more than we have here in Canada and North America. Maybe it’s time we stopped talking and started acting before the next, even bigger, data mining scandal blows up.

In a recent survey, one in 10 respondents said they plan to kill their Facebook accounts, but beyond that sort of individual action, a much broader and focused response is needed.