Privacy – “But I Have Nothing To Hide”
I hear this often from people. Fortunately, for all of us, this is true.
Sharing is Caring
People are generally very open and like sharing their stories, which includes just “loving” platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. as these allow you to do it for free. with very little effort, from anywhere, at anytime.
When sharing your life with others, you are exhibiting basic human behaviour, so what is the issue the some people have with “privacy”?
Data Mining Is Not OK
If things that we shared were temporary, we would never have an issue. Most people say things from time-to-time that they didn’t mean, or take a picture of something that they regret doing. This is normal human behaviour. The problem with doing this online is:
- Anything you “share” is stored permanently.
- Anything thing you do that involves access to any websites, is collected, without your consent. (This includes what you did on each website)
Both your activity while online and the information you deliberately share, is tracked and aggregated into a “digital footprint” which is unambiguously identified as you. The ability to do this from the world’s population is called “data mining“.
The ability to do this is made easy for those that are collecting this information as people are either, not concerned about privacy, or are unaware that it is happening.
You Grow and Evolve Over Your Life
Now consider this. As we grow up, we learn new things, change our opinions, make mistakes, apologise sometimes, hold grudges, make friends, dump lovers, find new interests, leave home, change jobs, travel, have children and join political parties.
This is only a small list to illustrate the fact that, as a species, we constantly change over our whole lifetime.
Your Data Is Currently Being Misused
Now that you know that your digital profile is being built up by a number of organisations, with or without your permission, are you still happy to be profiled as the person you were 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or last week?
What if you government introduced a “social credit” system such as what is being used in some countries now, where you get demerit points for “bad behaviour” and credit points for “good behaviour”, and the behaviour is defined by a tyrannical government?
What if you committed a crime when you were 15 years old and the laws changed to treat 15 year old people as adults? Remember, we are not talking about “court records” but a virtual representation of you, stored at a large company or in a government database. This is not looking very good now, is it?
What if your virtual representation is stolen from a government database and used for illegal purposes by a cybercriminal?
These things are all happening right now, under your eyes and in plain view. If you look at world events you will see some of these things are occurring in countries all over the world. Digital information has no country boundaries and you can be assured that the all of these will occur at some time the near future.
Protect Yourself Immediately
So you can see that the need for privacy is no longer related to whether you are conducting criminal activities, or not. It is about the desire for organisations and government to create a detailed profile of you. (everything you do, everything you see, everything you think, every characteristic you have, etc.)
While it may be too late to erase your existing digital profile, it is still possible to tackle privacy for the remainder of your life. Here are some recommendations to help you achieve this:
- Use as many names as possible, when you sign up for any online service (including shops).
- Use as many email addresses as possible when signing up for any online service.
- Never give any identifying information when signing up for something, unless you are legally required to do so, or the service provider is unable to provide the service without the information.
- Only use computer systems that cannot track your online activity. At home, this would include using a VPN, a secure operating system such as Linux, a browser which respects privacy such as Brave or Librefox.
- On your mobile device, turn off all location services, turn off any marketing tracking, enable all privacy settings and use a privacy respecting browser such as DuckDuckGo.
- Pay cash whenever you can. Credit cards are easy profiling tools. In addition, any government digital currency system should be completely opposed.
- Close your Facebook, X, Youtube, Google, etc. accounts. (I know this is hard. But consider all the great alternatives, mentioned on this website, that will still allow you have a happy healthy digital life!)
As soon as you start implementing the measures above, your digital footprint will become blurred. Most connected computer systems will no longer have a good “profile” of you. It is not perfect, but it will come a long way towards giving you some basic privacy.