Understanding Sensitive Information
Before we start learning about the concept of cyber anonymity, it’s important to understand the level of sensitivity of information. In today’s world, information is power. If you look at the wealthiest companies in the world, all of them are related to information. Typically, we think illegal activities, including dealing drugs, selling weapons, and smuggling, generate lots of money and power, or “create kingdoms.” But the reality is, information has power exceeding all of these underground activities.
The world’s top wealthiest companies and individuals have gained this status by managing information. Typically, data is in the raw form of facts and statistics. This can be used for reference or analysis. Once properly analyzed, data becomes information. Information is generally processed data that gives us meaningful context that can be used for decision-making. That’s why information has become power as information is processed, structured, and organized data that enables powerful decision-making.
As an example, let’s take an advertising campaign that utilizes TV or social media advertisements. With TV broadcasting, it will broadcast to millions of people, but the target customer engagement would be a very low percentage. If social media is used, we could select the precisely interested or prospective users to advertise to. So, the impact will be very high. This is more powerful than we think. If you select the exact audience that you want the advertisement to reach, selecting attributes such as age group, gender, and geography, it will be more effective. Not only this, but nowadays, social media even has data about users’ genuine likes and dislikes. If we use social media, the advertisement will be delivered to prospective users. This is also known as direct marketing.
This chapter will cover the following main topics:
- The categorization of information
- Different forms of sensitive information
- Raw data can create sensitive information
- Privacy in cyberspace
- Cyber anonymity