XOXO your toilet spy
Your phone saw more than anyone else did! It saw you with one eye closed and one eye open typing a message completely wasted. It listened to you singing naked in the shower to your favorite songs. It saved the location of a cafe you went to on that terrific date. Have you ever wondered how much of this information is your phone secretly sharing with the rest of the world? According to The Privacy Project, a single data file, collected in a year, can contain information from more than 12 million American phones with 50 billion location tags. Based on the data, your location is the only necessary bit of information needed to recreate a simple chain of events to track down every step you take during the day.
However, my experience with phone privacy began differently. It started with my new phone featuring a front pop-up camera and a toilet. Now picture that, you are enjoying your time playing a game while suddenly a camera pops up staring into your perfectly relaxed at the moment face for some time and then goes down. My camera is disabled for most of the applications. So, there was no way it could have randomly turned itself on in the middle of something. A bunch of thoughts went through my head. Who was that person looking at me through the camera? My perfectly private moment was ruined by my toilet buddy!
Here comes a question that followed up on the toilet matter. Who are these people spying at you in your most private moment and what kind of information are they collecting about you? These companies are called data brokers. Their main responsibility is to gather files containing information about consumers. As reported by The New York Times’ article, such data companies nowadays focus not only on our web history or card purchases but rather on the demographic composition of data. They gather information about your age, income, emails, ZIP codes, geographical location, and even phone numbers. Data brokers sell this information to marketing companies to help them construct a consumer profile. This is how advertisers get detailed information about their audience and their significant characteristics to maintain their marketing strategies.
They gather information about your age, income, emails, ZIP codes, geographical location, and even phone numbers
Although, after finding out that your privacy is over, you should not start covering all of the cameras with tape or trying to erase your existence from the Internet. According to the Fox News’ article, if you are worried about being tracked by data companies, there are a couple of steps that you can take to protect your privacy. The first three of the rules apply to tracking through location, ads, and web activity. You have to limit access routes to your device focused primarily on storing your location history. Online accounts, apps, and any virtual assistants are on this list of limitations as well. You have to make sure that online databases are not saving information about you by default.
The Times’ opinion piece on phone protection adds a very crucial point to the discussion. When talking about privacy, we have to understand that location tracking is hard to avoid. There are still ways to identify your device through the I.P. address or your mobile carrier. You can always disable your mobile ad ID, stop apps from tracking your location, and prevent Google from saving your data. VPN can help to protect your data for some time until data protection will become a federal law. However, these data brokers are constantly developing their ways of getting that sweet data from you. Therefore, even if you keep up with every possible limitation to restrict tracking, you can still miss some simple alterations to your privacy.
Location tracking is hard to avoid
So, what happened to the toilet spy at the end? After a few days with the location setting off, the spy completely disappeared. I have also stopped getting some advertisements based on my current location. It seemed like I have isolated myself from the Internet for some time. However, with the new system update occurred a more hilarious outcome. Google Assistant has gained power over the phone now. This new feature intervenes whenever my location changes by asking simple a question “How may I help you?”. The question is usually followed by the phone initiating a web search with the voice recorder on listening precisely to every word I am saying. In the end, my toilet acquaintance evolved into a silent listener; Google Assistant. He is following every step of my life, listening to every word I’m saying, and tracking my web history!
You will ask what the resolution is for you as a reader. The idea is simple — every single one of us has their toilet spy. He might be a shy one, that’s why you don’t notice him. He likes to see your web history, listen to your voice, and track your online orders. You simply do not see it. He gathers information on you and sells it to your favorite marketing team. So, welcome to your privately shared life with the rest of the world! You are the one who decides now what to do with it.
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Daria Biryukova is a student at American University in Bulgaria with a major in Journalism and Mass Communications and a minor in Mathematics. Covering her laptop camera and turning the location settings off when moving places became the number one rule for her.
