A judge with preferences for hard core porn, a police officer investigating a cyber-crime, a politician ordering burn out medication - this kind of very personal and private information is on the market. Get sold to who is willing to pay for.
In a long time experiment, with the help of some social engineering techniques, we were able to get our hands on the most private data you can find on the internet. Click stream data of three million German citizens. They contain every URL they have looked at, every second, every hour, every day for 31 days. In our talk we will not only show how we got that data, but how you can de-anonymize it with some simple techniques.
This data is collected worldwide by big companies, whose legal purpose is to sell analytics and insights for marketers and businesses. In the shadow of Google and Facebook, companies have evolved, their names unknown to a broader public but making billions of dollars with your data. The new oil of the 20th century.
Our experiment shows in a drastic way, what the youngest decision reversing the Broadband Privacy Rule means. What the consequences for everyday life could be, when ISPs are allowed to sell your browsing data. And why that piece of regulation from the FCC was so important regarding privacy and constitutional rights.
Svea Eckert works as a freelance journalist for Germany's main public service broadcaster "Das Erste" (ARD). She is researching and reporting investigative issues for the PrimeTime news shows and high quality documentaries. Her main focus lies on new technology: computer and network security, digital economics and data protection. Bigger projects and documentaries are for example "Superpower Wikileaks?" (ARD), "Facebook - Billion Dollar Business friendship" (ARD), her first book "Monitored and spied out: Prism, NSA, Facebook & Co" and in 2015 "Netwars" (ARD). Svea Eckert studied "Journalism and Communications" and Economics in Hamburg. She completed her journalistic training at NDR, Hamburg and Hannover. Twitter: @sveckert Website: www.sveaeckert.de
Andreas Dewes is a trained physicist with a PhD in experimental quantum computing and a degree in quantitative economics. He has a passion for data analysis and software development. He has received numerous awards for his work on data analysis and his work on data privacy and big data has been featured in the national and international press. Twitter: @japh44 Github: adewes