By NOEL MURPHY
PERSONAL online data previously thought confidential are a new $40 billion “oil boom” for business to sell and use, a Geelong academic has warned.
“There really is no place to hide, even if you really don’t want to be found,” associate professor Martin Hirst told website The Conversation.
He argued that a new surveillance society had everyone under constant watch, physically and electronically.
Major high-tech companies had been covertly throwing “open our emails and video conversations alongside anything we choose to store in the cloud”, Prof Hirst said.
He cautioned the public to be “alert and alarmed”.
“The old adage ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear’ from the surveillance state no longer holds true,” he posted on the website.
“We no longer live in that world. The number of government agencies taking an interest in information about us has grown like Topsy.
“The national security state has extended the policing functions of government to all areas of life.”
Prof Hirst said the value of “big data” was comparable to the oil boom or “panning for gold in terms of potential profitability”.
Google, Microsoft, Telstra and other companies justified co-operation with government and spy agencies on the grounds it was the price of doing business, he said.
“So many connections are available to be tapped, correlated, combed, combined and sold. The value of this market is currently estimated at over $A39 billion annually and growing at around nine per cent per year, according to analysts IDC.”
