From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How can we make data secure?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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How can we make data secure?

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(bright music) - [Interviewer] You know, we hear it in the news all the time now. Something's been breached, something's been hacked. Why does that happen? What's the vulnerability? How do they get exposed? Like, can you talk to that a little bit? - This is one of the most pressing challenges we have in the fabric of technology right now, is in some degree, how porous it is, how easy it is to get stuff out. You know, there's security, there's ethical use of data, there's appropriate use of data, there's all these things that come together in this thing, but let's just take security to start. The first is, what does it mean to responsibly take care of someone's data? You know, when I give the data, what does that look like, and how do you make sure it's well-taken care of? That first part there is, many times, the data, data isn't being structured or stored in a good way. You know, for example, we just may put everything in one database. You think of it as like, a giant spreadsheet, and you may have your name, your address, your social security number, all of it's just in one line, so if I get access to that one line, I've got it all. Well, why won't we break that apart across multiple spreadsheets or multiple databases? That's not hard. So, what is a paradigm of the architecture in this sense? Second is, there are data scientists that are out there that are working with the bad guys. And so, if they're able to get some data, from here and here and here, they can put a lot more together. They've realized that if they get access to a miner's data they can use that data to grow a credit profile that they can then use later. It's easier with the technology, especially as we get to machine learning and AI, to fictitiously abuse your data with identity fraud and theft and all those type of things. There's a race to be able to steal data, to get it, to acquire it, because one that data's gotten and it's out there, you don't get it back. And so people want that data. There's people that want that data for economic reasons, there's people who want that data for reasons that are national security-related, and all that gets wrapped up together, and what we haven't done necessarily well is ask ourselves, as the broad ecosystem of the world, how we're gonna get better at this. What does that mean? Well, first is, how do we actually have rights of disclosure, protections around your data, what happens if it's breached? Could there be a treaty that says, look, we don't do certain things against each other with data. What does it look like if we all came together to fight a problem around fraud? Not just here in the US, but all around the world? Together, we're gonna fight bad guys with data. We have to think more creatively about the technical solutions of what this needs to happen, to make sure that data is robust and secure. (bright music)

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