How the ecosystem of digital assistants can ensure the security of personal data

Abstract

Number of cybercrimes is constantly rising both in Europe, and around the world. The costs incurred from such malicious activities are rising correspondingly. According to the data collected by Jupiter Research these costs increased from $1.5 trillion in 2015 to $2 trillion in 2019. That is why European Union is expected to introduce major changes to the Personal Data Protection Acts which stayed mostly unchanged since the 1990s. The consequences of those changes will be felt in countries beyond the European Union. The personal data of internet users have long become a commodity on the e-commerce market. Yet the manipulations with the personal data cause concerns among both the users, who do not fully realize how and to what purposes their data are used, and governments, who try to protect the confidentiality remains by the law. Despite that the number of incidents with data leaks continues to rise exponentially. In December 2017 the lawyers from Hill Dickinson, a UK commercial law firm, filed a lawsuit against Google regarding unlawful collection of the iPhone users’ data. Another company that is about to have problems with law is Uber Technologiesm, which sent SMS messages to its clients without obtaining formal permissions for that. Finally, in March 2018 it was Facebook which had to explain the way the personal data on more than 80 million users have leaked and ended up in the hands of a third party. The authors of this article assessed the possibilities for introducing the ecosystem of virtual assistants and blockchain technology for safe and depersonalized data processing as well as its further use. This system opens broad unexpected opportunities for the machine-to-machine-marketing.

Keywords

• virtual assistants, blockchain, personal data, e-commerce.