We used to enter all the required information asked by any of the website, without understanding the consequences of it. Since these are marked with RED asterisk “*”, we have no choice but to provide it. Have we ever thought, why does these information asked?

We are habitual of receiving lots of mails on daily basis. Our mail provider, Outlook, Gmail, Ymail etc has given us the Spam / Junk mail facility, where we can move such unwanted mails. Our mailing system is already very intelligent, which moves many of such mails in the spam / junk folder by its own. It does have the feature, which permanently delete such mails over a period of time.

Since we are so used to about these mails, notification, alerts, calls, sms, whatsapp message that we sometimes decide to live with it. Some of us gives up and let it be like that. Some of us decide to fight back against these unwanted messages. As a result we have DND “Do Not Disturb” facility, still some of these unwanted messages are reaching to us.

What these messages are? Well these can be advertisement, promotions, news, information; the matter of fact, these could be anything. But if we haven’t subscribed for these, why these are coming to us? Unfortunately knowingly or unknowingly we used to subscribe for these messages, while accepting the terms and condition during the registration of some of the sites / portals etc. Now if we have done so, then there should not be so much of hue and cry.

The problem starts, when so many of such messages starts appearing from many providers.

How does others getting our data? Is the site / portal whom we have provided our information responsible for it? Is the owner of the company responsible of it? Is the government responsible of it? If the owner of company resigns, will that resolve the problem? If the CEO gets terminated will that solves the problem? The answer is NO. The process has to be matured to secure these information.

There are possibly two very simple and common method of such data leak, one – code’s security testing wasn’t done properly and two – someone internal or external has the database access. I am not blaming here the developers or hackers, instead I believe someone’s responsibilities are compromised.

Remember the future’s oil is data and that is the reason you will notice everyone is asking for data. The more data the company have, the better prediction will be done by them. To understand it more, we take the simplest example which we see during our Search. As we start typing to the search box, it starts giving us suggestions. Similarly our personal and professional information provide lots of information to others. Lets take another example; we used to receive lots of calls for loan, how? They know out credit score and they have the defaulter’s data with them. Lets take another example; we used to receive lots of mail and calls about many job portals including those whom we haven’t even registered, how? They are pulling the information from our professional database.

So far there is not any solid idea, which I am aware of to stop data leak and misuse of our data but one, which may reduce these, is to make ourselves responsible of our data because whatever is once out over internet, assume it is public. Hence we should deactivate our account from all those places, which are not needed anymore. Stop registering ourselves here and there. Think twice before installing any free software. Think again for registering ourselves for receiving any free alerts or promotions.

Again the Data is today’s Gold, the more it is with the companies the better they will be. So the companies will keep on asking for it. It is for us, how we deal with it.