New Delhi: Mass data collection will drive 15 per cent growth in anti-surveillance technology and concerns over the erosion of privacy will lead to a booming anti-surveillance economy market in 2020, a new Forrester report has predicted.
2019 is the year that “breach fatigue” went mainstream — with new stories popping up every day about the theft of personal data, stolen password databases, or ransomware shutting down state and local governments.
“In 2019, corporate economic surveillance expanded, and it’s not just collecting data from users; 56 per cent of global data and analytics decision-makers report their firm will expand its ability to source external data,” the global market research firm said in a statement.
Cities in China and the UK possess over 100 and 68 cameras per 1,000 people, respectively, which allows gait detection and facial recognition use cases.
Consumers desiring to preserve privacy will turn to anti-surveillance technology that conceals, distorts, or blocks public and private surveillance tools next year.
“Examples include clothing that foils license plate readers, anonymized search engines, lockers for private deliveries, anonymous credit cards, VPNs, anonymization services, and ad blockers,’ the report mentioned.
Twenty per cent of enterprise customers will prohibit the use of their data for AI.
Despite the improvements, ML and AI offer, more and more enterprises will become selective about what data they give to their vendors, even if that choice makes the product or service they’re using less effective.
“Companies that use enterprise customer data to improve the experiences of B2B clients in their products and services will see organizations choosing to opt-out of data sharing due to concerns about anonymization, privacy, and accidental disclosure,” the analysts wrote.
Deepfakes — video forgeries that make people appear to be saying things they never did — will cost businesses over a quarter of a billion dollars.
“Attackers are using AI technologies like natural language generation (NLG) and video AI to generate fake audio and video designed to fool users. Social engineering attacks are nothing new. What’s new is the technologies being used,” the report noted.
In what may be the first known attack of its type, a German energy company was defrauded out of $243,000 in March 2019 when an attacker spoofed the CEO’s voice and convinced another executive to wire the funds.
The forged videos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went viral recently.
The technology used to create deep fakes continues to improve and will become easier to use and accessible by more people, the report said.
This proliferation will lead to an increase in deepfake-based attacks that will eventually rival business email compromise (BEC) in size, an attack-type that cost businesses $1.3 billion during 2018.
