The transcription features a conversation with Claudio Popa, discussing dark patterns in online marketing and their influence on consumer behavior. It delves into concerns about privacy and data security in education, especially with the integration of digital tools in classrooms. The evolution of e-learning in public education is traced, emphasizing data breaches and privacy lapses. The role of privacy commissioners in overseeing data usage by educational ventures is explored, noting the need for updated legislation to address modern privacy challenges in the digital age.
Transcription
6454 Words, 37399 Characters
Welcome and thank you for joining us.
Today I have a special guest. I'm joined by Claudio Popa.
Claudio is the CEO of Informatica Security and founder of Knowledge Flow Cybersecurity
Foundation, which is a non-profit designed to raise cyber situational awareness in the home.
I met Claudio through a roundtable discussion on misinformation and disinformation for
Project DFUSE, which he co-hosted in conjunction with NATO.
One of the focuses of the Knowledge Flow Foundation is to teach safe online interactions
for school-aged children. And cyber safety and privacy and education is our main topic today.
Claudio, thank you for joining us. Well, thank you for having me on the show. It's a pleasure.
So before we dive into the topic of education, last time we spoke,
you mentioned the concept of dark patterns. And I was hoping you just say a little bit about
what dark patterns are. Oh, well, thank you for asking. Dark patterns are something I've been
fascinated with for about 15 years now. It was one of the reasons why I decided to write the
Canadian cyber fraud handbook, which was published by Reuters, but it's for a legal audience, for
law enforcement. And dark patterns have been an offshoot of the pressure put on marketers
to deliver results. And so we've seen that the internet as a whole has been turned into a
for-business, for-profit tool, much to our horror, people like me who have been online since the
green screens back in the late 80s. And we saw the web come up and so on. And you used to be
able to do transactions and make your own decisions. But with the more advanced abilities of the
new languages behind the World Wide Web, we've seen capabilities for marketing and for influence
take shape. And that kind of influence is something that has been tremendously useful for
businesses small and large, but usually larger ones. And so I have a presentation in which I
took a screenshot of an Amazon screen and it shows two, three, four, five different elements of the
page that all converge to get you to buy more or to buy a particular product or to be influenced
to have a positive view on a particular decision that you should be making right this moment.
So essentially, dark patterns are influences that you do not perceive to be happening that
often have a financial driver to them. And we can certainly provide examples. They range from
something as innocuous as literally showing up to pick up your pizza. And there's a tip request.
And so you're like, but we're not this is this is a pickup. We're not sitting down to eat at a
restaurant. Why is there a tip that has been added to my to my bill? Oh, it's it's actually a service
fee for us to, you know, cover operating costs. Well, that's a significant service fee at 15 or
18%, which sounds like a tip amount. But online and offline, these things are now normalized. And
that's a concern because we have seen not just Amazon do this type of thing, but I often get
calls from my my own mother who says, you know, my antivirus is expiring, and it's asking me for
money. And I say, no, no, just click the free option and stick with that for now until I've had a
chance to review. And she says, no, there is no free option. And I look at the screen and the free
option is clearly there, but it's grayed out. And I keep seeing more indications that there's a
subset of the population that only sees highlighted things on screens. And it's very difficult for
people to actually perceive grayed out buttons and prompts and words that simply say, you know,
download free in gray on light gray versus bright yellow with some contrasting text color that says
by now. And so she feels that, well, you know what, only the by now option is available. And it's not
just this type of deceptive practice, but it's the anxiety that goes along with it for a certain
subset of the population that has made the the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a non
profit group that protects people's digital rights and privacy to partner up with consumer reports
to create a tip line where people can report their own dark patterns. It's if you're looking for it,
it's at dark patterns, tip line dot org, which is very interesting. And I find out I found out
about it myself when I was preparing for our interview today. So it's a growing aspect. And
it's a type of deception that unfortunately just adds to all the other baggage that we have whenever
we go online, everything is trying to influence us. And whether that's ethical or not, sometimes
marketers that are under pressure don't seem to care. And they try to push the envelope.
Right. So these are design choices in the presentation of information for us that leverage
what's known about human behavior and human psychology and human tendencies to try to direct
us towards the desired outcome from the company or the marketers. So just to play up your example
a little bit more, you might join a marketplace looking to shop for a particular item. And you
think that you're surveilling the options and making an informed decision based on the options
presented to you. But in reality, the website that they're using is actually funneling or
otherwise manipulating you towards an outcome that they desire rather than letting you sort of have
free reign amongst the available choices. Does that sound like a fair description?
That's exactly right. And if it has to use psychology mixed in with misdirection
to get you to make a decision, not just the particular decision that they're looking for,
but that particular decision right now is really the goal because it's keep in mind this is
transactions per hour. That's the metric that most organizations care about. And this is why
there's such high pressure when there's a data breach to stall investigative reports. There's
a whole as part of my business in information security, whenever there's a reported data breach,
there's an entire communications program that is designed to effectively delay providing as much
information about breaches as possible because it impacts sales per unit of time. And that's
expensive. We've seen it in a number of organizations, most notably here in Canada,
we saw Indigo be put out of business for what was it, a month, where this was an online
e-commerce activity that brought in something like a billion dollars or hundreds of millions or
something crazy like that. I may be completely wrong on the numbers, but all that to say,
as soon as that is interrupted, that's a big deal. So if people perceive that there's no
incentive to buy, they simply walk away and they give their money to somebody else. So
that's the impetus for a lot of this. What we perceive to be misleading and deceptive,
they simply perceive as efficiency and effectiveness in e-commerce transactions.
Right. So it seems like a willingness to sacrifice the autonomy of the consumer in the
name of the desired outcome for the company. That's correct. It brings about an entire set
of discussions around, is it fair to influence, using psychology, misdirection, etc.,
the decision process of someone? Do they still do so willingly and intentionally,
or have they just been influenced by somebody who's an expert at this type of thing and who's
accountable? Right. That's very interesting. Very interesting. Probably should dive into
that in a different take, but thank you. Thank you for describing that to us. It is a
pleasure. Very intriguing concept. Something that people need to be aware of, I think.
I'm sure our listeners can think of any number of these dark patterns because sometimes you
emerge from a website and you've just found yourself ordering a whole bunch of stuff.
Amazon Prime members are typically primed to keep ordering stuff because suddenly two days
have gone by and nothing arrives at the door. It's a similar situation to when you're late at
night and you're watching these infomercials and you find yourself buying something. Well,
you certainly were not planning on staying up late and buying stuff, but there you are.
Yeah. It's the same method. Great. Thank you for that. All right. Let's pivot a little bit now and
talk about our intended topic for today's podcast. So you're an expert in privacy concerns,
specifically having to do with children and as that relates to education. So this was already
happening before COVID, but certainly with COVID it exacerbated the process of including or
incorporating digital tools into our classrooms. And so I was wondering if you could just say a
little bit about some of the concerns that you're seeing in terms of the way that digital tools
are being used, implemented, or introduced in education. Absolutely. I think it's always been
inevitable and quite frankly desirable for technology to enhance the way we educate. Technology has
always been an enabler. Technology is something that is near and dear to my heart. I've created
tons of technology tools and designed them and so on. And it's always been the intention of public
and private education to leverage tools. Right around the turn of the century,
23 years ago, we saw more and more programs that are both engaging for students and
able to track the performance of a student population over time so that you're able to
extract some sort of statistical data based on on the usage patterns of the software that's running
on school board equipment, which used to be some of the safest in the world. So anytime I saw,
I visited a school board, I saw that they had servers, some heavy duty servers, mainframes,
etc., some regular Windows machines that were secured and lived inside of server rooms with
people that took care of these things. So the care and feeding of these machines was always taken
very carefully by qualified IT experts and specialists. As 2016, well sometime after 2012,
rolled around, we saw the advent of cloud services and software as a service. In other words,
software as a service had been coming for a long time. We called it the ASP model for a while and
it just means delivering technology services over the internet. Instead of having programs
running on your computer, suddenly you open a browser and there's the program and it looks
like a simple interface. And that simple interface is technically speaking a website. It's served up
from a server room somewhere. It may be in our country or another country. That's why we call it
the cloud. It just kind of obfuscates this entire idea of where where's the data. So that's the
beginning of the slippery slope. When people stop asking where is my data, you know that there's a
vast risk that is certainly looming because this is what the word cloud wants you to do. It tries
to make you forget that all data is stored somewhere. So what we typically say in our
business is the cloud is somebody else's computer. And so you can get stickers that say that. You
just type it into Google images, you get your your sticker. It's a reminder that any time you put
data into the cloud or in any website, it's certainly not on your computer. So it's outside
of your control instantly. Right. And so between between 2012 and 2016, tons of organizations
putting started putting in a lot of effort into developing these website based educational tools.
They initially were doing the exact same as regular educational technology. And then they
started expanding and getting more ambitious. And the reason for that ambition is because
venture capitalists and investors came along and said, well, it would be nice if we had some data
from demographics that we typically aren't allowed to collect, which is to say
children, minors, students. And so that data is definitely something that they can't directly
exploit. But what about indirectly exploiting it? What about just knowing how many children are in a
particular jurisdiction? What about knowing a distribution of ages, seeing patterns as far as
their likelihood to click on stuff, let's say. And by 2016, they the industry matured to the point
where we were looking at tens of millions of dollars being invested into the e-learning space.
And these venture backed education companies took a turn for what I think is the worst for two
reasons. One, they started aggregating information without ever offering to delete it. So there was
no data retention policy in place. You put in the data just goes one way. It goes into a system.
That system is under the control of an external company. The case was made for school boards
to not need server rooms anymore. And if they don't have server rooms, they have no need for IT
specialists to manage them. So they lost a lot of brain power at that point and expertise. So
suddenly you're depending on an actual vendor, which is usually a small company that has just
started in the past few years, or in some cases months. And you depend on these developers
who are not security or privacy specialists. They are software development professionals.
And they work as part of a group to create an interface that is pleasing so that people
will enjoy using the technology. But they are specifically funded for a reason. And the funding
goes into them because they are able to have touch points with specific information that's
collected from students. This is important because the agreements, the legal agreements,
the contracts that are put in place with the school board can never be changed. And the reason
they can't be changed is they are tied to the investment that goes into these e-learning companies.
So they come out and they say, look, we are going to monetize the data at some point. We may be able
to sell part of this company. We may be able to sell the entire company at which point all of
this data will go along with it. We have a stated objective to share this information with as many
connectors as we can. Those connectors are external companies that school boards and schools
have no visibility into. They simply provide little tidbits of code and additional services.
They are part of the supply chain of the vendor, of the e-learning company. And so they're not even
included in the agreement and the contract. So this is how far the personal information
or perhaps the statistical data collected from students can go. It can go until you can no longer
see it. And so from the perspective of what happened in 2016, in 2016 we saw the beginning
of massive data breaches. We saw that e-learning companies did not have adequate security in
place. And it resulted in tens of millions of students' data being lost, being breached as part
of some of these security incidents, which resonate to this day. I was doing a TV interview
a couple of months ago and the cameraman actually said, well, that's an interesting topic. You're
speaking about my son. I'm still getting spam that resulted as part of the data breach that took
place. He was with one of the largest school boards in the Toronto area and my son's information
was stolen. And I said, well, that was quite a few years ago. And he said, yeah, we've been
getting spam ever since and the data was apparently leaked and released online, which is why this is
such a big deal. It's a bigger deal than information belonging to adults. These are young people who
are impacted perhaps for tens of years for our generation. So anyway, the breaches began in
2016 and they continued right up until 2019 when companies started being aware of the fact that
their reputation was being impacted by these losses, by these privacy breaches. And of course,
there was additional pressure from regulators to say, hey, you know what, we appreciate the
innovation, but could you please tighten up your security practices because it's impacting
children in so many different ways. So that in a nutshell is the evolution of e-learning in
public education in particular. There really hasn't been a concerted effort to figure out
procurement. So the procurement question is the crux of the problem because you have a number of
incentivized individuals who build relationships with the school board. They sell
technology to administrators. Administrators are not security or privacy folks. So they don't
know what questions to ask as part of the service contracts. And they don't really have that much
of a grasp of the actual harm that can come from data being stolen. And I presented to
a number of law enforcement teams. I said, here are some screenshots just so that I'm not doing
all the talking. Here are some screenshots. These were screenshots of cell phones. They were text
messages sent to mothers saying, I can see that your child is in such and such a classroom.
You're not going to see them again. There's a bomb attack in the school. We know exactly where
they are at any time of day. You need to pay us now or you'll never see your child. So of course,
it's extremely stressful and likely the accountability for this is not just on the
part of criminals. It obviously needs to be shared by the decision makers who adopt those types of
insecure technologies. Yeah, absolutely. To that point, I know that you work with the
privacy commissioner. Is it the case that they were just sort of behind the times in terms of
having legislation in place that requires school boards to vet these or to that limits how the
data can be used by these educational venture capitalists? What was the role there of the
privacy commissioner? Well, that's a very interesting situation. So in my previous work
with privacy commissioners has seen a number of activities take place. One was in the design
of best practices for handling personal information for kids, for adults, etc. So within the scope of
privacy by design, that has everything to do with adopting privacy and security for their own sake,
as opposed to making the case that, "Hey, you know what? We are in business. We need to maximize
profits, but we will comply with the law as much as we can." In this particular case, we're talking
about school boards that are regulated provincially, so provincial legislation that typically deals with
privacy. Well, that kind of provincial legislation used to be very innovative back in the early 80s,
but that predated e-commerce and the Internet itself and even some bulletin board systems,
BBSs, if any of our listeners are that advanced. So we're talking about the kind of legislation
that structurally is meant to protect names and addresses. Back in those days where we used to
buy, let's say, a computer program from a store that sold such things, we used to get a little
card in the box and the card said, "Please fill out this card so that we can know our customer and
will send you an update because we appreciate your paying for this thing." That is a form of consent
that today is frowned upon because just look at the opportunities for friction. Just look at how many
people do not return that card and all of those are seen as wasted opportunities. Back then it was
seen as a nice option to have to know your customer and if they didn't want to return the card then
so be it. We've already got their $22. Now we need to be able to extract information in real time
and potentially monetize it in some way or another. The legislation, municipal or even the federal
legislation, basically said you need to care about personal information wherever possible,
try to ask for consent, but if you can't, it could be passive. You could opt people in
and then maybe give them an opportunity to opt out. Of course all of this hinges upon the great
assumption that people understand what privacy is, what control over their information might be or
entail, what the harms are in having your data in the custody of someone else. The simple fact
that when somebody has your information, they don't have your information, they have a copy
of your information, therefore you do not necessarily suffer at that particular moment
from somebody else having a copy, but of course if everyone has a copy of your information,
your information has less value. I was having this discussion yesterday with a company that
creates identity management software and they have 83 different identifiers and they use that as a
selling as a differentiator and I explained that the more of their partners that information is
shared with, the higher the risk of identity fraud because with that many identifiers,
you're essentially inviting somebody to clone the identity of a victim. The law has not been in place
to curtail that type of data collection. It has not been in place to force people to request
express consent, never mind informed consent, which is verbiage that is used now at the federal level.
How do you make sure that your customers are informed but not scared? Because there's this
concept of data salience or privacy salience that says the more you talk to people about privacy,
the less likely they are to share it. If it's your duty to inform people, then you're shooting
yourself in the foot by providing them with choice and so that is the big ethical question for
marketers today. One of the topics we talk about in my class is not just the importance of having
informed consent as a goal but the practicality of it. There are some people who say, given the
recursive dynamic nature of information, dissemination, packaging and resale, even if you could
clearly convey to a client at a given point in time exactly how the information is going to be used,
that story might not be true a week from now. As you mentioned, there are different connections,
there are third-party relationships where this information is a vast swirling whirlpool of
intermingling with other information, repackaging, connection to other things. As you said, you
could inform a client of how you're using their information now but without safeguards in place,
you have no idea how that information is going to be used in the future. So informed consent becomes
exponentially more difficult where first you have the obstacle of explaining to somebody who's not
an expert what's going on with their information now, but you're also in the impossible situation of
trying to have an exhaustive account of how that information might be used in the future,
which even if they have good intentions and want to do that, which as you point out,
they're disincentivized to do, it's not, it might not be practically achievable.
Absolutely. So to my way of thinking, asking organizations to get informed consent,
you're essentially asking organizations to find loopholes around this verbiage. And if it puts
them in an ethically challenging position, they don't mind that because their loyalty is to the
investors, for instance, or to their growth objectives. What I prefer to do, and I recommend this,
I prefer informed consent to be accompanied by a number of privacy harms. And if you can list
the categories of privacy harms, you are building credibility with the audience, you're building
credibility around your own space, and you by default would become a privacy champion as
an organization that simply says, you know what, there are, there's a number of harms that come
along, you don't have to list out scenarios, right, because there are infinite scenarios.
But there's almost a finite set of types of harm, for example, economic harms, discrimination harms,
autonomy harms, physical harms, reputational relationship harms, psychological harms. These
are serious sounding things, which if I read it in a privacy policy, I would say, oh, well,
that's interesting. So there could be a physical harm to the simple act of me agreeing to allow
my information to remain in the custody of this organization, right, because they've already
collected it, they're just notifying me that there are such harms. So maybe I can start there
and look into what scenarios might unfold. This is much better than just empty use of the word
express consent. I consent to sharing something, and I accept all risks. How can I accept all the
risks if I don't even know what the risk categories are? That's an interesting approach. I think
that's possibly fruitful, you know, it's that in categories instead of needing to spell in detail
exactly what's going to happen, you might be in a better position to explain the possible nature
of harms, right, like you said, so there could be physical security concerns with the type of
information they're sharing. That's very interesting. So, and I didn't, again, it's, we always get
inspiration from somewhere. And I got this idea, because if I say it in a vacuum, it sounds,
it sounds outlandish, who's ever going to adopt this? That already exists today when you buy
shares on the open market. You buy a couple of shares of a particular stock and it comes
with a prospectus. In my case, I was reading this prospectus that was 427 pages long to figure out
why this stock dropped. And in it, 160 pages was dedicated to risks associated with your investment.
They were itemized exhaustively in a printed book that I have. And that, to me, is an ethical
approach to informing people about their investment in a company that could go to zero.
It's the same thing when your investment in an educational technology not only can deliver no
value from an educational perspective, but it can go beyond zero in that your economic harms,
your physical harms, and all the other different classes of harms can actually occur during a
breach, during mishandling, monetization of your data, et cetera, et cetera. This could actually
ruin your life. And that should be made clear, not in those words. Hey, you're about to click on a
button that will ruin your life. No, but if we're looking for an effective use of the word informed
of the term informed consent, then the ethical thing to do would be to list the categories
of harm that can come as a result of your accepting the risk. Because keep in mind,
this is what they're always doing. They're asking you to accept the risk. The problem in the public
education sphere is that administrators do not understand the risk. Teachers are not educated
to identify it or to exercise their autonomy to basically say, "Hey, you know what? We read the
privacy policy, and we don't think this is appropriate for our classroom." Parents are never
asked, and students are certainly not in a legal position to accept or reject a privacy consent
form. So there is an ethical foundation to the entire e-learning stack, technology innovation
stack, because the word innovation comes up a lot. There's a ton of pressure to modernize
public education processes. And if you don't, then you're a laggard. There is an ethical stack
here that should be looked at in a layered way. And the lack of leadership, particularly from
regulators, show that as a country or as an economy, we're not quite able to protect
individuals. We are prioritizing growth and profit by monetizing the personal information
of those most vulnerable who don't even have a voice, children.
That's an important point that you raised there. I just want to touch on that for a moment.
Privacy is a valid concern for people considered fully autonomous adults, but in the situation of
children, school-aged children, it's further complicated by the fact that the parents are
surrogate decision makers for the information that's ultimately about the student. And so that
further complicates things, and I think it's another area that's worth diving into. But for
today, let's refocus back on education, as you mentioned there. And if you had the ear of the
Minister of Education or the various ones across the provinces, what are some recommendations
you would make to try to address some of these concerns that you've been raising?
One big one goes back to our discussion about dark patterns. At the beginning of each school year,
a letter, ideally, arrives, and parents need to be aware of which technology tools are going to
touch the personal information of their children. That entire process is fraught with ethical concerns,
and anyone can see it. For one thing, there's a delay when this letter arrives, the school year has
started. Secondly, when the letter arrives, it's a tiny bit of information about each tool, and
each description downplays the impact. It does not talk about harms. It doesn't talk about the
processing that takes place within these e-learning tools. And the biggest issue with it is that
it's an incomplete list. So this list, for example, at our school, we have something like 100
tools that are used as part of the e-learning ecosystem. We are asked about three of them.
Are you okay with using this math program, which has been endorsed by such and such?
Yes, no. Keep in mind that if you say no, your student will be excluded from such and such
activities. So there's a ton of the kind of pressure that may be considered to be dark patterns,
both in the verbiage that's used in these forms and in the implied threat of exclusion
that comes with parents exercising their rights to not share that information.
There's a ton of peer pressure that happens. All parents are saying, "What do you mean?
You opted out of that? Why would you do that to your child?" Et cetera, et cetera. So there are
concerns with the consent process. So that's one thing I would definitely speak to the
Ministry of Education about. Two additional things that I would talk about. The most important one
is securing the supply chain. It doesn't just mean auditing the individuals who knock on the door
and say, "I have a better e-learning tool." It means auditing their fourth and fifth and sixth
parties that they depend on because no cloud-based tool is self-sustaining. They all depend on
suppliers and that relationship is based on sharing data. Data is the raw material that makes
the new business model of the web function. So all of that hinges upon somebody taking
responsibility for the use of data. In all cases today, school boards come out to parents and they
say, "Don't worry, the school board is accountable and responsible for your children's data."
As soon as you push back on that and you ask questions, they either use secrecy to withhold
information or they simply say, "We are authorized to do this because of the Education Act of 1982."
Therefore, you do not have the right to withhold consent as a parent. That requires a ton of
reform, but the focus here is on securing the supply chain and carrying out proper professional
audits. That means learning how to do it, employing professionals who know how to audit a vendor.
Right now, I have not seen it. I just have not met a school board that has a competent individual or
set of individuals who know how to carry out proper vendor risk assessments. These are year
over year relationships that just get renewed at the end of the year. Why? Because the data
is cumulative. That is my third point and perhaps most important, the fact that you need to have
data deletion, you need to have a data purge. Data is like hot coals. If you're increasing your
appeal to criminals and others, you're likely going to have a data breach. At the moment,
part of the reason for the success of the cloud model is the fact that you no longer have visibility
into the attacks. It used to be that IT folks, they could name exactly the number of attacks
against their firewall per second or per minute or per day. All of that is outside their control
today. It is under the control of vendors and people who have not been properly vetted. Do we
know that they're using software developers that have been trained in secure coding? I
really see that as a rarity. But what we need to remember is that data deletion is a way to
protect students. Once a year, that information that gets collected throughout the year needs
to be deleted securely from all of the systems of the vendor and all of their own ecosystem of
third, fourth, fifth parties, partners. This is critical. Today, it's not happening anywhere in
Canada. Data just grows immensely. That means if my son skips school on a particular day,
as he goes into university, that time will be remembered by the system and may be used for a
decision for him to be accepted in university. Because you never know what metrics are going to
be in use when the competitiveness of the field increases. At that point, they might look at any
kind of metric in order to put a quantitative score on somebody's eligibility. That data,
which could be mixed in with camera views, with schoolyard incidents, with all kinds of stuff
dating back to grade one, all of that just keeps on accumulating and becoming that much more valuable
for the company, for the vendor company. It's a terrible idea to store that information beyond
the end of any school year. That is a huge data purge that I recommend. There should be a data
deletion week at the end of each school year where you're celebrating and partnering with
vendors who are conducting their business ethically and are saying, you know what, we are securely
purging and you get a data deletion, data disposal certificate that says we've deleted everything
and in the fall, we start fresh. That is responsible use of children's data. That, to me,
would be a hugely ethical improvement to public education, at least in Canada, but really all
around the world. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's very insightful. I appreciate that. That's an
important point you make that it's not just the principle of we want to protect the privacy of
individuals as a principle that we uphold, but the sort of nefarious possible uses of that information
against that person's initial consent is obviously a significant concern. That's
fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Claudia. I really appreciate you taking the time today.
You've got a lot of amazing insights into these topics. Do you want to list your
website or some places people could possibly learn more about this type of information from you?
Well, sure. I don't know if it was mentioned, but as the founder or a co-founder of
the Knowledge Flow Cyber Safety Foundation, I'm very privileged to be working with a fantastic
team of just privacy-focused people of all ages, and we keep on adding resources to
the KnowledgeFlow.org website. Anyone who goes there, they can be seniors, they can be new
Canadians, they can be students, teachers, administrators, law enforcement. They will
find a section that just has free resources in multiple languages. They've been professionally
translated, tip sheets of all kinds created professionally. There are many opportunities to
volunteer as well, because this is the only Cyber Safety Foundation in Canada that's certainly
focused on these same topics, and we always appreciate people reaching out and saying,
"Hey, you know what? We really appreciate your materials, and would you like to speak at our
group, for example?" That's how we end up speaking all over Canada. As far as my company is concerned,
it's datarisk.ca. It's a cybersecurity company that's actually a twin sister of a managed
Privacy Canada organization, so managed privacy.ca is a twin sister of datarisk.ca. Together,
they are security and privacy.ca. It's an interesting thing, and I only mention it from
the perspective of the fact that any organization, any association needs to really pay attention to
both security and privacy, but you can pick and choose what you're looking for, whether you're
looking for privacy compliance or are looking just for security to have the assurance that you can
protect yourself and others. It's an interesting way of doing that, and if you're a non-profit,
you go through knowledge flow, and you will get those same services from certified professionals,
but at fractions of the cost. Our goal with knowledge flow is to deliver as much as possible,
that's free. Forget about everything I said about companies. What's important to us is to
deliver free information and knowledge through knowledge flow, through kids, through volunteers,
through passionate professionals. Also, don't forget the coalition that I mentioned earlier,
the darkpatternstipline.org. It's kind of fun to be coming across. Now that you've been sensitized,
hopefully all of our listeners have been sensitized to the existence of dark patterns,
you can go to darkpatternstipline.org and think of something to submit, because
a lot of companies are extremely innovative, and it's always neat to see examples of dark
patterns. At the moment, they're infinite. I have three-hour presentations on dark patterns,
and it's nice to have a place to submit these things. I have nothing to do with the site,
but it seems like a really cool place to visit. Either way, thank you very much. It's been an
honor to take part in today's podcast, and look forward to next time.
Yeah, thank you so much. This has been incredibly informative and interesting,
and yeah, obviously so much more we could have dove into, but I appreciate you taking the time
today, and I'll say thank you very much for joining us on the podcast, and enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you. Thank you. You too.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Claudio Popa is the CEO of Informatica Security and founder of Knowledge Flow Cybersecurity Foundation.
The discussion covers dark patterns in online marketing and their impact on consumer decision-making.
Concerns are raised about the use of digital tools in education, particularly regarding privacy and data security.
The evolution of e-learning in public education is outlined, highlighting data breaches and privacy issues.
The role of privacy commissioners in regulating data usage by educational ventures is discussed.
Summary:
The transcription features a conversation with Claudio Popa, discussing dark patterns in online marketing and their influence on consumer behavior. It delves into concerns about privacy and data security in education, especially with the integration of digital tools in classrooms. The evolution of e-learning in public education is traced, emphasizing data breaches and privacy lapses.
The role of privacy commissioners in overseeing data usage by educational ventures is explored, noting the need for updated legislation to address modern privacy challenges in the digital age.
FAQs
Dark patterns are deceptive design choices that influence users without their awareness, often driven by financial motives. They manipulate users into making decisions or taking actions that benefit the company or marketers.
Examples of dark patterns include misleading prompts for tips or fees, grayed-out options to push users towards desired choices, and deceptive marketing tactics that exploit users' psychology.
Digital tools in education have raised concerns about privacy and security, especially with the shift to cloud-based services. Issues include data breaches, inadequate security measures, and potential exploitation of students' personal information.
Challenges include insufficient data protection, lack of clear data retention policies, and the potential for unauthorized data sharing. Students may face privacy breaches, exposure to risks, and long-term impacts on their personal information.
Privacy commissioners work to establish best practices for handling personal information, including data privacy by design. However, outdated legislation and lack of specific regulations for digital tools in education pose challenges in protecting students' data.
Cloud-based educational tools raise concerns about data security and privacy due to potential vulnerabilities, data aggregation without clear deletion policies, and third-party data sharing practices. These issues pose risks to students' information and highlight the need for stricter regulations.
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