In this informative and also humorous TED lecture, Allesandro Acquisti, a researcher on the behavioural economics of privacy, talks about the current state of privacy online and why we should care about it. He concludes his talk with the following thought:
“I do believe that one of the defining fights of our time will be the fight for the control over our personal information. The fight over whether big data will become a force for freedom rather than a force which will manipulate us. Right now, many of us do not even know that the fight is going on. But it is, whether you like it or not. And, at the risk of playing the serpent [inside the ‘garden of Eden’ of commercial advertisement], I will tell you that the tools of the fight are […] the awareness of what is going on, and in your hands, just a few clicks away.”
