Your smartphone is hackers' next big target

Editor's note: Parmy Olson is a journalist for Forbes magazine, covering mobile technology. She is the author of "We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency."

(CNN) -- In the world of cyber security there are some well-known designations for anyone that considers him or herself to be a hacker, the term being so broad in scope now.

One can be a "white-hat" hacker or a "black hat," the former being someone who uses their programming prowess to protect digital data, and the latter someone who seeks to subvert and steal it for their own malicious reasons. Fall into the middle and you're a "grey hat."

The recent revelations about the NSA in the United States have made these labels much fuzzier, since government and NSA hackers should be white hat. Yet a recent report in the Washington Post, citing top-secret documents and an internal audit, showed the NSA had broken privacy rules thousands of times as it conducted its widespread surveillance.

Of course, navigating the ethics of data privacy is a complicated business since there's just so much of it -- 90% of the world's data has been generated in the last two years, according to IBM.

A very likely consequence of the NSA revelations from former cyber security contractor Edward Snowden, is that people will increasingly not care who the hacker trawling through their data is -- whether it's an ethically-conflicted government contractor like Snowden, or someone more unscrupulous trying to sell their digital address book to spammers.

They just want their data to be un-hackable.