What Have We Done With Our Personal Data?

Have you deleted your Facebook account in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica news? I’m not saying you should—really, I’m not—I’m just wondering. Because if you’ve tried, you may have figured out that it’s not that easy. You can’t just zap the app from your phone and call it a day. No—you’ve then got to reach out to the owners of all the other apps that you gave permission to access your Facebook info. Because as Facebook will tell you when you do delete their app, your data still may exist in the other system’s platform. And you need to contact all those other vendors in order to get it removed.

I did not know this prior to my interview today on Cloud Unfiltered with Ashley Roach. He’s a Principal Engineer and Evangelist for Cisco DevNet, and I actually had him on the show to talk about their programs for application developers, but then he started talking about his interest in data security, and all hell broke loose.

OK, that’s overstating it. Ashley is a very calm individual, and doesn’t seem like one to overreact to anything, so hell definitely did not break loose, but let’s just say that when we started talking about data security, things got very interesting. I mean honestly—what have we done? We’ve served up personal data like puff pastries at a wedding. Passing it out with little thought at all to whomever asks. And obviously we haven’t just given it to Facebook. Twitter has it. Instagram has it. Our activity tracking apps have it. And sure we’ve been told “If you don’t have to pay for the product, you ARE the product,” (at least you’ve been told that by your developer friends if you live in the Bay Area), but man—something about the happenings of the past few weeks have suddenly made it real for me. And my chat with Mr. Roach made it even real-er. (I know that’s not a word.) He has some very interesting insights into how expansive the problem is and what it will take to fix it. If you’d like to hear our conversation about this topic, skip ahead to minute 34:23 and check it out.

If you’d prefer to hear what we actually intended to discuss, start at the beginning. There you’ll hear all about:

• How Ashley got into tech
• What visitors will find in the new app developer area of Cisco DevNet
• What his own podcast is about
• The Black Hat/White Hat Challenge
• What he’s doing with an Alpha wi-fi card
• Why he thinks Git is elegant
• Why he doesn’t let his 13-year-old daughter have a phone

 

Here are the links if you’d like to check out the full show: YouTube| iTunes | SoundCloud

If you’d prefer to go straight to the assets Ashley mentions, here are some other links:

Ashley’s Twitter Feed: https://twitter.com/aroach

DevTools Podcast with Ashley Roach: https://devtools.libsyn.com

DevNet Application/Software Developer Site: https://developer.cisco.com/appdev

Finally, if you’d like to check out past episodes of this podcast (we’ve got 40 of them!), just pop on over to the archive at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/cloud/podcasts.html. Really. Do it. You’ll have a great time.