A large number of friends or colleagues have posed the following question to me: ?How can you have a (Insert popular voice assistant device here) in your home, doing what you do?!? This is normally within the first 30 seconds of walking into my home, which admittedly is probably more akin to the film set of The Minority Report than it is an actual house. These conversations are normally framed around grounded perceptions of privacy, data, and security. Sometimes though, it does veer dangerously close to a point where I consider fashioning them a foil hat to stop the device listening to their every word and thought. My response? It doesn't need to listen; we readily offer more information than it could ever collect.

Working within cybercrime, fraud and investigation, the subject of privacy always brings with it these ethical and sometimes paradoxical conversations and choices. There is a balance between our subjective perceptions of security and risk (emphasis on the subjective) and our trade-offs against convenience and reward, but ultimately it comes down to our knowledge - the knowledge of the mechanics of how our data and digital footprint is researched, contributed to, and aggregated.

My personal choice and this pseudo consensual relationship with my technology and data, is based on an understanding of how my privacy and data is used and how I weigh that against - including, to my shame, arbitrary things such as being able to turn my lights on without switches. The fact remains that although we have a familiarity with technology and the internet, most of us are entirely in the dark about how much we contribute to our footprint. Not knowing what information is accessible and its overall value, means we can't always make the informed choice in the first place.

How much of our identity is sculpted by our relationship with technology only became apparent when I was trained to investigate and research the information itself. Our perceptions, vulnerability and beliefs are projected on to our online profiles with every post. Every visit, every scrolling session, every link contributes to both an open and closed, interconnected data set that we both actively and passively contribute to. Making it the most valuable resource we have access to, which without proper training such as our Internet Research and Investigation course we confine our research and parameters to our own habits and perspectives.

One of the most valuable things I have learnt from this understanding is to question my own biases. We enter a relationship with online platforms and applications not understanding the mutually coercive environment they create when they are designed only to pre-empt and present you with the information that it/they believes you ?want,? mixed with the result you predetermined, i.e., confirmation bias. This veritable cocktail of influencing algorithms and our own habits means that the information we discover, and research isn't always the truth, but instead galvanises what we already believe.

How can we give researchers and analysts the tools to make best use of bespoke search techniques and freely available applications? Our Internet Research and Investigation course on 4-5 October, developed and run by military and law enforcement intelligence specialists, will look at how best to use the internet for focused searches in response to organisational requirements whilst ensuring the user's digital footprint is as minimal as possible.

You can register for our Internet Research and Investigation course here.