Reply to post: Once upon a time

Tesco parking app hauled offline after exposing 10s of millions of Automatic Number Plate Recognition images

adnim

Once upon a time

many medium to large businesses and corporations processed data in house.

Off the shelf commercial software would be joined together with custom code to do what was needed.

A van with a heavy looking dude might turn up to take some tapes off site every day.

The data could come in from many places in many formats and would go out hopefully exactly as expected, exactly where it was wanted.

The processing and data control was often in the hands of a small, loyal team. Hardware would be supported in house too.

It sounds clunky, not exactly agile, but it worked well for many years. Data breaches were rare, faults were found and resolved quickly.

We now have businesses that contract out almost all of the data processing part of their business, not only car park management. But, payroll, human resource management, data management and data storage, coding, gateways, security controls etc.

And those contracted to do these tasks will sub contract those tricky parts they don't or can't do themselves. And as we move down the sub contractor pecking order, the understanding of and vested interest in the task diminishes. How long can a chain of sub contractors be?

The data will pass through a lot of control boundaries on its journey from a to b, all managed by different sub-contractors few of which will understand or even care about the process end to end.

As we rush toward a pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, numbered, globally connected, data sharing future. A future in which multinational corporations will exist name only, all the actual business function being outsourced. Expect more of your privacy to become public. Expect your corporate puppetmasters to care less when they respond to your pain with AI.

As the distinction between corporation and government becomes undefined, we welcome you to the machine.

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