In the last decade, we have witnessed the boom of smartphones, and with it, the massive growth of social media. Facebook alone has almost 3 billion monthly active users. People got used to share their personal information online. Every day they share posts, stories, family photos, and much more. They’re willingly giving up their privacy without realizing the implications of doing so. Many people don’t care about privacy, they believe they have nothing to hide. Others consider privacy to be a thing of the past.
In this article, we will try to give a quick introduction to privacy and explain why you should take it seriously. The loss of privacy can have devastating effects on you, your family, and your society as a whole.
What is Privacy?
In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Privacy is defined as the “freedom from unauthorized intrusion”. This means, by giving up your privacy, you’d be giving up one of your freedoms.
❝ Saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. ❞
Do you have the right to Privacy?
The right to privacy is mentioned in more than 150 national constitutions. It is one of the foundations of civilized society.
❝ No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. ❞
What puts your Personal Information at risk?
Every time you visit a website (or use an application), you’re interacting with one or more organizations. They offer you information and/or services in exchange for payments and/or personal data.
Your data is valuable to these organizations. For some companies, such as data brokers, collecting and trading your data is at the core of their business. The data industry is a quarter-trillion dollar industry.
What makes your data so valuable?
Organizations track you across the web, they gather your information like pieces of puzzle and stitch them together to make profiles of you. They get all sorts of personal information on you: identity information, biometric information, payment information, emails, addresses, location history, sexual orientation, relationships, religious beliefs, political views, browsing history, online interactions, DMV records, credit card history, …
Businesses around the world are willing to buy your data in order to better understand you and sell you more products. Authoritarian governments tap into this data to control their population and spread propaganda. Foreign governments use this data to spread misinformation. Bad actors use this data for illegal activities such as credit card and identity theft.
Even if a company has legitimate reasons to store your data, there’s always the risk of hacks and data breaches. The number of accounts exposed through data breaches has been growing significantly. In the last 5 years alone, billions of accounts have been exposed from companies such as LinkedIn (2021), Facebook (2018 & 2019), Twitter (2018), Starwood - Marriott (2018), Equifax (2017), Yahoo! (2017), …
Why do businesses collect data?
There are many legitimate reasons for businesses to collect user data. For example:
- Providing a service requested by the user: Online services require some amount of data to operate. For example, a delivery app would need your home address to be able to provide you with the service.
- Offering a good user experience: User Experience is essential to the success of a product. In some cases, data is needed to improve the experience. For example, a streaming service needs to create a taste profile in order provide you with relevant movie recommendations.
- User Notifications & Marketing: Companies often need some personal information to communicate back to users. For example, an email address can be used to send notifications and newsletters.
- Security: Companies often collect personal information to prevent service abuse or to secure an account. For example, an IP address can be used to identify the country of which the user request has originated.
Note that even data collected for legitimate reasons can be abused and should be deleted as soon as it’s no longer needed.
There are many other reasons to collect data that are more controversial and more easily abused:
- Providing Personalized Advertising Services: Advertising platforms such as Facebook and Google offer these types of services. They enable anyone to target you based on your personal information. This means businesses can target you with ads that can be relevant to you. It also means bad actors can target you with misinformation and manipulate you for political or other reasons. This has been done in the past on many occasions such as the Cambridge Analytica Scandal during the 2016 US Presidential Elections.
- Increase User Engagement: Social media companies design algorithms that consume user data to increase engagement. When pushed to extremes, this could have many negative impacts such as user addiction and the spread of misinformation.
What are the consequences of your personal data being exposed?
If you’re not careful with your personal information, you could easily get yourself in trouble. Besides being targeted by misinformation, businesses can secretly buy your data to discriminate against you:
- An insurance company could bias a quote based on your lifestyle and genetic information.
- An employer could bias their job offer based on your family and financial situation.
- An employer could fire you based on comments you’ve made online many years ago.
- A school could reject your application based on your personal information.
- An immigration officer can reject your visa application based on comments you’ve made online.
In the case of data breaches, a bad actor can use your data for illegal activities:
- Your location information for example could be used by a thief to break into your home while you’re on vacation.
- Your private photos could be accessed or leaked by hackers leading to social embarrassment or loss of job.
- Your financial information could be used for identity theft and could get you in serious financial trouble.
- Your photos on social media can train face recognition software to identify you in any photo or video feed. It can also be used to generate fake photos and videos of you.
Sky is the limit here. You should think of your digital footprint as an attack vector. The more information you put out there, the more vulnerable you are. Nothing good comes from exposing yourself online.