Data Collection

As mentioned previously, the data sonification stem from a larger project that examines the construction of data breaches as crises from 2005 to the present. The year 2005 was chosen because it marks the transition from using “virus” to “breach” to describe cybersecurity threats, reflecting both technological and linguistic shifts. Additionally, 2005 was just before the widespread adoption of smartphones, with Apple introducing the iPhone in 2007 and 1 billion smartphones in use by 2012. Studying data breaches over this period highlights the shift from desktop computing to pervasive cloud computing and data collection.¹

We examined 16 data breach cases in total from 2005-2021. As we observed, in cases in the early years, it was often challenging to assess the geopolitical significance of data breaches, as these events were not yet ascribed to the same level of significance as they are today. Consequently, we selected high-profile data breach cases that received extensive coverage, which helped shape the discourse around data breaches. For example, our analysis reveals that in 2007, data breaches were viewed as inevitable consequences of technological progress, unlike contemporary sources that focus on identifying the causes or malicious actors behind breaches. This framing of technoscientific progress as inevitable is noteworthy because, in later years, data breaches are seen as abnormal or exceptional. We understand this shift as a normalizing discourse of the data breach as security crises.¹

Our sample includes primary sources from a variety of publications, gathered using the Dow Jones search engine Factiva. Factiva, though primarily a business news database, offers extensive global coverage of newspapers, trade journals, blogs, and websites, making it ideal for our study on data breaches. We developed a framework for identifying key terms and phrases, using search terms (like “MyFitnessPal” AND “data breach”) for specific case studies. We limited our searches to the year of the public release of information about a data breach and examined the five most frequently publishing sources for each case in that year. Our sources often included major publications such as the Associated Press, BBC, and The New York Times, and we also incorporated relevant international and local news sources as needed. We filtered each publication’s results by relevance, ensuring the articles were primarily about the given case, contained sufficient information for analysis, and were not republished from other sources. We collected approximately 10 articles from each source that met these criteria, resulting in a total of 288 primary sources across 26 cases.¹

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