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Privacy and security

2018: A Big Year for Privacy

By Carl Landwehr
Communications of the ACM, February 2019, Vol. 62 No. 2, Pages 20-22
10.1145/3300224
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lock on 2018 background, illustration — Credit: Andrij Borys Associates / Shutterstock

The year 2018 may in the future be seen as a turning point for privacy incidents and associated privacy-policy concerns. In March, the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook incident opened many eyes to the unanticipated places personal data reaches, and it continues to generate repercussions.⁴ Google shut down its struggling Google Plus social networking system in October, after announcing it had exposed the data of approximately 500,000 users,¹⁵ only 1% as many as involved in the Cambridge Analytica case. Facebook revealed another data breach in October, this one affecting a reported 29 million users.¹⁴

The open GEDmatch genomics database, developed for genealogy research, was used by police and genetics experts to identify alleged murderers in two "cold cases" and several other crimes.⁸ The site's founders, at first uncomfortable with its use by law enforcement, seem to now be more comfortable with it. Researchers subsequently estimated that today approximately 60% of Americans of European descent could be identified from their DNA, even if they had never registered their DNA with any site.⁶ Further, they forecast the figure will rise to 90% in only two or three years.⁹

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