Is Privacy Dead
What I want you to do after you finish reading this, is email me every single login you have. Not just the nice and respectable ones, but all of them. Because I want to be able to go through them, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you’re not a bad person, if you’re doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide.
Glenn Greenwald who is a famous journalist and speaker has said that to every single person who has told him that they have nothing to hide. Not a single person has taken him up on that offer. And that offer stands for anyone reading this.
We all have something to hide
We all want privacy.
That is why you close your curtains when it gets dark, why you lock your front door, why you have passwords on your accounts. Because we don’t want everyone to be able to see it.
People who are famous can afford privacy, that is why they have security guards, why purchase huge mansions, and why most people don’t see them. It isn’t just about online security, it’s also about physical privacy.
What about knowledge of physical location?
Let’s say for a minute that I can know where you physically are at all times. With that information I can find out where you live, where you work, where you buy food, what your favourite restaurants are and so on. That not seem that scary to some people. But with that data, I could impersonate you, I could read what you get in the mail, I could redirect your mail to somewhere else, I could get new credit cards in your name. I could do a ton more, and that’s just physical access.
What about virtual access? I could order a SWAT team to your house, I could shut down all the accounts in your name, I could make you bankrupt, and a lot more.
I promise I won’t do any of that, but that phone you have, knows where you physically are at all times. While the phone itself might not do anything, what about the apps installed on that phone? They could do many of those things I mentioned without you even knowing.
igital information
Do you trust everything on your phone 100%? I know I don’t. Most people don’t know all the apps that are installed on their phone. Phone companies are becoming more aware about the need for privacy, Apple and Google both require you to approve permission to such things as your contacts or your location before an app gets it. Before this was put into place, any app on your phone could get all that information when you installed the app.
Every website also knows a bit about you. Some of it’s required for the website to be shown to you, and some do it because they want to know more. There are many websites that let Facebook & Google know you’re on their site and the exact pages you go to. For example, NPR tells 147 different companies each page you read. Europe isn’t any better, with Deutsche Welle (also known as DW), by default, has over 160 other companies know that same information as well. Why do 160 companies need to know what news article’s I’m reading!?
I’m sure there are multiple companies that are on both of those examples. They could keep that data to themselves and change what you see on their own sites. Or what Google does, it allows NPR and other companies to sell ads based on someone visiting a website, or if they like certain thing’s. Ever notice how an ad or your results seem like they know what you are thinking. That’s because they know what site’s you visit.
Sure, some people may say they don’t mind that because they were going to buy that, or go to that site anyway. But, there are some companies that collect all this information about you, and we don’t know what they are doing with it. They could be selling it, or keeping it until a hacker takes over the company and finds that very specific information about you. And they could destroy your life.
No privacy in a country?
There are some countries in the world where you don’t have any privacy, China is one of the major ones. With their social credit score system, if you don’t do the right thing you could lose your high-paying job, not be able to travel, have slow internet, and a lot worst. Not doing the right thing could be littering, or crossing the road somewhere that isn’t an approved spot.
Privacy is alive and well
Privacy is alive and well. We all have our own level of how private we want to be. You will feel overwhelmed if you decide to start caring about your privacy, start by taking one thing at a time, and asking questions about what you care about and what you want to protect.
And remember that if you still don’t care privacy, please email me every single login you have, so I can read them and publish whatever I find interesting. Besides, if you don’t care about privacy, you should have nothing to hide.
Additional links:
The complicated truth about China’s social credit system
Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens
China’s Chilling ‘Social Credit’ Blacklist
Apple Rolls Out Major New Privacy Protections For iPhones And iPads
Privacy Isn’t Dead; It’s Just Evolving. Here’s How to Keep Up.
Privacy is not dead; it’s powerful
Is Privacy Dead, written by Ola Bini
Why privacy is important, and having “nothing to hide” is irrelevant
How we survive the surveillance apocalypse
Potential danger of using your real name online?
Ways to protect yourself when a data breach happens
Decentralization – why it’s more important than ever before
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