Who's in charge of your privacy?
Who should be protecting and ensuring your privacy?
The government, social media companies, the businesses you patronize, software companies and developers, all of the above or none of the above?
Today is Data Privacy Day and a good time to take stock of this important question and how good a job any of those entities are doing.
For those who wondered why ‘You’ wasn’t on the list, extra points. All those entities have a part to play, but the responsibility? The court of last resort? The owner of this problem is each of our responsibilities.
But how well prepared are we to take control? And is it even possible?
A 2019 Pew Research study found that 60 percent of us believe it’s not possible to go through a day without personal data being collected by either companies or the government. Eighty percent are very/somewhat concerned about how their information is used.
Most of us seem to know that we are on the wrong side of the risk-reward equation: 81 percent believe their data is at risk with companies; 64 percent with the government.
But how well equipped are we to know what to do to equalize the balance? And how much control can we really have?
Admittedly, there’s little we can do if the government listens in on our phone calls, or our cars track our location and health habits (like smoking, and weight). But for everything we can’t do anything about, there are a number of things where we can exercise control.
Here are some suggestions:
Stop hitting OK whenever social media or a website asks you a question. Most of us have been conditioned by IT staff/customer service, help blogs, and well-meaning friends to just “OK through that.” Wrong. Your browser does not need access to your webcam unless you’re on a video call, the Panera Bread app on your phone does not need location services to be turned on at all times. Apps that are given that level of access to your location information can also store, maintain it, or sell it.
200 million Americans already have code on their phones that is tracking their location constantly. In most cases, it got there because we downloaded it and clicked OK. Be choosier about apps. A lot of us download apps to try them out, find out we don’t use them, and just leave them languishing on our devices. Take some time and do a fearless inventory of your mobile apps. Delete those you never use.
Social media is a black hole where your privacy goes to die. And it’s not just Facebook. It’s Reddit, Pinterest, Amazon, Spotify and dozens of others. Facebook offers a lot of controls over how much of your information is shared out to other users (but very little control over how much of your data Facebook shares with its corporate partners). Until a federal privacy law is seriously debated, we can’t control how information is shared between companies.
But where we have control, we need to take it. The National Cybersecurity Alliance has a website with a lot of resources for both businesses and individuals, including links to all the security settings pages for the most popular social media and sharing sites. Being aware of your current settings settings and adapting those you don’t feel comfortable with goes a long way to taking control of your privacy.
We can’t farm out our personal security and privacy to companies or the government. No one is more interested in keeping you safe than you. Where the companies and government work against you, that’s a place for privacy legislation to fill in the gaps.
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