Marco Bellin, CEO and founder of Datacappy, weighs in here on The American Innovation and Choice Online Act in MarketWatch’s latest feature on the bipartisan bill aimed at curtailing Big Tech’s massive power.
Category: datacappy
You’re waiting on an oil change at the car dealer, and it’s easy and “free” to connect your tablet to the public WiFi so your child can play an online game. Once you click “Accept & Agree,” you’ve gained access to the free WiFi and digitally told the business that you agree to their terms for using this service. Unfortunately, there are hidden costs of using that free public WiFi.
The term “free” is something most people, especially parents on a budget, appreciate. We enjoy free samples at the grocery store, BOGO deals, and free WiFi when at a cafe, hotel, airport, or other public place. However, have you thought about what really happens when you or your children take advantage of that “free” WiFi? You’re risking personal privacy and safety.
Whether you’re supervising your child’s tablet use while waiting on an oil change or your teen is posting to social media at the movies with friends, the hidden costs of free WiFi usage apply. There are many ways our personal data is compromised and used via public WiFi and popular apps. Hackers steal passwords, putting your money, identity, and safety at risk. Your phone and email contacts as well as call logs and calendar data can be read and stolen, too. Businesses and even non-profit organizations may track your personal history online, often as a means for target advertising, but still invasive. In some cases, even real-time personal location is tracked.
Criminals use personal data to steal money and identities. Child identity theft has risen significantly in the last several years and often isn’t discovered until the child applies for a driver’s license or credit card. Privacy also is invaded when permissions are unwittingly given (clicking that “Accept & Agree” box). Your personal data may be used to see the websites you’re visiting as well as browsing history. Data collected is given to third parties, other companies that store and use data to target potential consumers.
Parenting is hard enough without the constant worry of online safety. We live in a digital era, but we can take charge of our online safety. Here are some easy-to-follow tips:
- Turn off Bluetooth features in public spaces.
- Turn off the device feature that allows for auto-connect to WiFi hotspots.
- Always check the privacy settings of devices to opt out of data collection.
- Check that any website used is secured with HTTPS protocol and not just HTTP (Read: “How Secure Is HTTPS?”).
- Look for the “Secure” and little lock symbol before HTTPS in the website address bar.
- Consider using a VPN (try Datacappy!) when accessing public WiFi.
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Protect Your Digits
Protect your phone number and protect yourself. If a form on a website asks for it, think twice before typing it in. The more widely distributed your phone number is, the easier it is for companies to track your behavior online and serve up ads to you. And because your phone number is so closely tied to your identity, it’s a prize for hackers, too. Keep it close and protect yourself. If your kids have phones, they need to keep those numbers closer.
It seems innocuous. At the end of a transaction, a company asks for personal information such as your phone number or email address. While federal regulations prohibit soliciting phone numbers via autodialers, loopholes remain. Experts say if you give your phone number out, it will inevitably end up in a database of some sort—just another bit of their vast data collection efforts. Once that happens, an untold number of companies can use it to track you across the internet.
What Will They Do With My Number?
Even if your number is on the Do Not Call list, businesses have the right to call you for 180 days after your transaction due to a “business relationship” exemption. (In this case, it must be a human calling rather than an automated machine which is more costly for the company.) Additionally, there is no restriction on the number of times a business can text you even if you’re on the Do Not Call list. Lastly, companies outside the United States are not bound by these federal laws against automated calls and messages. This means that a company in India is free to call and text you frequently if you give their company your number. The better option: Don’t let them have it. Protect your phone number.
Hacking’s Worse Than Tracking
That’s annoying. Worse, though, is when a hacker finds your phone number. Because banks and billing services use your phone number to verify your identity, it’s a useful valuable piece of information. In some ways, it’s a key. One of several, usually, but an important one. For that reason, too, you want to avoid sharing your number online.
There are instances in which can’t avoid it. If you pay bills online, you’ll likely have to enter your phone number. Not ideal, but if it’s a secure site that has your number, it’s probably not worth worrying about now. More worrisome are the single-use forms, services, quizzes and games that seem to fill the internet. If there’s any way you can, protect your phone number.
Here’s a hard truth for parents: Big Tech knows more about your kids than you do.
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and so many more are vacuuming up countless bits of digital information about users. The details, when aggregated, paint a portrait of each person online that ordinary humans are unable to put together themselves.
These organizations may not know more about your kids’ personality than you do. But if your children are online, the people behind the websites they visit know an astonishing amount about their interests, taste, relationships and the things they desire and want to buy.
That’s true if your children have their own smartphone, tablet or laptop computer, but it even applies to information about your kids that you put online yourself. Across platforms and with no regard to the age of the users, Big Tech is tracking you.
What Big Tech Knows and How
As the Associated Press put it, “The companies gather vast data on what users read and like and leverage it to help advertisers target their messages to the individuals they want to reach.” For context, Facebook earned 99% of its money from ads in the previous year and Google’s corporate parent Alphabet saw 85% of revenue from ads, per the AP.
Meanwhile, Amazon records the details of not only each product you purchase, but also about what items you browsed for and compared before making a decision. If your kids are shopping online, Amazon has all that information about them, too. Though you and your family bear the cost, it’s a windfall for Amazon. AP noted that Amazon uses the user data it collects to boost the value of its ads. Ad sales revenue surpassed $10 billion in 2018 representing more than twice the earnings from the previous year (the latest statistics available). There is a huge financial incentive for Big Tech to know more about your kids than you.
In addition to boosting advertising and marketing for goods and services, the information collected by Big Tech about you and your family can include a whole range of other sensitive details. Think political affiliation, sexual preference and detailed geographical updates about where you live, work and vacation.
No Age Restrictions on Tracking
Big Tech companies track your whereabouts based on details from your smartphone as you are out and about. They know how old you are and where you spend time (shopping malls, churches, bars, and so on) to learn about demographics in your area and to target you even more precisely. If your kids have smartphones, Big Tech is tracking them in the same way. There are no age restrictions when it comes to tracking.
The information is used to predict as well as influence what you might be most interested in buying or which candidate you seem to favor for elected office. All the while, you’re presented with advertisements and “news” is fed to you in a curated, tailor-made experience.
Remember that it’s not just kids’ own online activity that Big Tech is tracking. These companies are also gathering information about the products that parents just like you are buying for their kids. They record what programs parents enroll their children in, what movies they watch and the photos that parents post online. All of this data is valuable to advertisers, which is why they take such pains to collect it on a massive scale.
What You Can Do
What are concerned parents to do under these circumstances? Part of your New Year’s resolutions could be to sit down and have a family discussion about the negative consequences that come from revealing so much information about ourselves.
The goal should be to emphasize security online and to protect your privacy from those who have no business snooping around your personal information.
Take steps to limit companies tracking you. Delete cookies when closing a web browser. Restricting how many personal details are posted online. Ask yourself if it’s really worth it to reveal your information to a new company by signing in using your Facebook credentials.
Maybe you’ll be less inclined to give up information to Big Brother when you consider just how much technology companies stand to benefit while you have so much to lose.
Reprinted with permission: privacyparent.com
Purchasing online with a little extra protection this holiday season makes a lot of sense. According to Marco Bellin, CEO of Privacy Parent, using a VPN and Private Browser might be the smartest gift to give. I stumbled on this article in “Women Love Tech” and they make a few really good points: 1) You don’t really know what you’re giving up 2) add in predictive analytics and say goodbye to any control you think you might have had and 3) we’re talking about your children’s’ data here!
Power rests with those who have the most information, the most detailed information, and the most up-to-date information. Amazon’s public-policy department is an army of lobbyists swatting at and gutting any privacy legislation showing up on a state’s docket. The power Amazon has to manipulate outcomes is akin to manipulating the human genome, but on a world wide scale. Please read the 3rd article in a series by Reuters “The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections”. You’ll leave saddened by how they take advantage of your data to manipulate you (and local protections) to add to their bottom line.
Read this!
The Amazon lobbyists who kill U.S. consumer privacy protections (reuters.com)
Who really wants Facebook to capture data from our stylish Ray-Bans®? They’re currently recruiting developers and scientists to evaluate, manipulate, and dream about uses for ‘immersive’ data: data captured from a third party perspective. These videos, images, and sound watch what you’re doing and hopefully give some very smart people the ability to predict what you’ll do next. These same smart people will be asking questions (benchmarks) defined by Facebook.
- What happened when? (eg: “Where did I leave my keys?”)
- What am I likely to do next? (eg: “Wait, you’ve already added salt to this recipe”)
- What am I doing? (eg: “Teach me how to play the drums”)
- Who said what when? (eg: “What was the main topic during class?”)
- Who is interacting with whom? (eg: “Help me better hear the person talking to me at this noisy restaurant”)
Am I the only one, that thinks this is worse than creepy? I’d like to add one more benchmark: Why would I trust those watching me? (eg: “Sell my data so that I can better decide which brand of soy sauce to put in my noodles.”)
I saw this on the BBC, here.
The recent 60minutes interview with Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook has the media classes in a bit of a frenzy. They’re tripping over themselves and repeating what we already know: “Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety.” Haugen has lined up testimony in front of Congress, and triggered another cycle of investigative reporting. Fine, that’s good, right? But haven’t we seen this before? Remember Cambridge Analytica? It’s starting to remind me of “Climate Change”. Facebook is the boogey man and we should reduce your carbon footprint! Jan 6 was Facebook’s fault not that other guys… A weekend in the capital for a CEO lashing sounds fun. Seriously, it’s all kind of like a traveling circus.
We’re all responsible for not caring about our data enough to pay for a trustworthy service. Can someone just say that? Why are these products free??? Homer Simpson says it best…
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The Cloud, The Proud
Since the stir about Apple’s invasive and hypocritical promotion of personal privacy, these stories about scanning cloud data for material which is deemed inappropriate, keep popping up. More and more users start to wonder: what exactly is happening to all my images, emails, pdfs, search traffic, etc. That’s a good thing. The pervasive sense that “I have nothing to hide, who cares.” serves these services well and persists.
It’s not coincidental that the options for keeping your data off of Microsoft, Google, Apple or Amazon’s public cloud servers are almost non-existant and any solution you find is complicated to set-up. But still… What options do you have if you don’t like the idea of backing up your data to Apple, Microsoft, Google or Amazon? One option would be to build your own private cloud server. It’s relatively complicated and expensive though over time and considering you probably pay multiple providers, it’s not as expensive as it may appear. Another is to use a hybrid approach, and keep your data locally, use these services at a minimum – maybe only the free limited data plans – and store your archives on a hard drive in the top drawer.
Remember when local storage was the only option? And who knows one day the internet might just not be available.
The article that got me thinking again about this is here.
There’s a great piece in the New York Times about Facebook’s tangle with it’s semi-independent data analytics tool, CrowdTangle. That tool was generating data which was driving some really bad press during the presidential election cycle. CrowdTangle is used by researchers, marketers, and journalists to evaluate and measure the engagement of specific Facebook content.
Unfortunately (for Facebook), with a crafty little approach, Kevin Rose was able to demonstrate that the far-right was being extremely successful distributing it’s message across the platform. Obviously Facebook executives were sensitive to this message… Check out the article.