Privacy is a significant concern for most mobile users

 The recent “Yiruda crisis” made many people reconsider whether their privacy is secure. A summary of the controversy is that private information in the chatting app "Science of Love" was abused to develop Yiruda (an artificial intelligence-based chatbot), without the permission of the users. Today, I would like to focus on why privacy requires stronger protection nowadays and share some ideas for privacy protection; rather than discussing right or wrong in the Yiruda crisis.

 First of all, why are developers interested in our private lives? Social security numbers, addresses, and family/friend relationships are good ingredients for making spam messages. Internet records and location information, which are relatively less sensitive information, can also be used for target advertising collecting data. Scatterlab, a developer of Yiruda, can be interpreted by the same mechanism. A key element to developing artificial intelligence is having a sufficient amount of data to educate the artificial intelligence. As collecting data takes a lot of money, Scatterlab chose to cheat on its users. Now we can answer, ‘why are developers interested in our private lives?‘ it is because it makes money.

 It is quite a recent event that personal information became economically valuable. We can simply relate this with the introduction of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism naturally carries competition among companies, which made it impossible for companies that lag behind trends to survive amid the market. This means that it became necessary for the companies to specifically identify what their consumers want. Besides, artificial intelligence, one of the most promising markets today, requires a lot of data for development. Moreover, the total amount of personal information itself has increased due to active Internet activity. 

 So, back to the point, what can we do to prevent privacy violations? Indeed, most people do not know the mechanism of how data is collected and utilize; therefore making it difficult to deal with personal data technically. Moreover, for records collected by companies to take our consent in advance, legal action is also difficult.

 However, some things can be changed. First, let’s think about the reason why people can’t modify the default setting of their privacy policy. The main reason is obviously that the consent form is too long and hard to read. Intuitively organizing the privacy policy, perhaps by using pictographs and by emphasizing clauses that users actually care about, will solve the problem. 

Yet, the question of 'what information should be organized' remains a stumbling block because each users’ main concern may differ. This can be resolved by sorting the articles from the most viewed to the least. This seems like a valid idea, but it is premised on the expectation that companies will actively cooperate in making another version of their privacy policy.

 There are other ways that do not require cooperation with the company. Private organizations could create and share a reorganized version of the privacy policy in several companies. However, who will be willing to do such troublesome work on behalf of others? Therefore I suggest we develop an open platform like Quora so people can alert each other of some nasty policies that were intruding on our privacy unwittingly. 

 The so-called ‘era of information has started. The enterprise and individuals will continuously have conflicts over privacy. I think that as long as our concerns on privacy don’t just end as a concern, but lead to active efforts to protect our privacy, we won’t be pushed around by companies.