Your data is more vulnerable than you think — Part 1
Meet Joe. He’s 28 and has an active online life. He joined Facebook when he was 18. A lot of people around him were switching from photo prints in shoe-boxes to digital albums. Then came Instagram, bringing with it — a wave of other photo services.
Today, most of the memories he’s made in his 20s are in digital format and spread over Instagram, Facebook and Google Photos. He also loves to journal his thoughts on Evernote and re-visits his chats every once in a while. And to top it all, almost a decade’s worth of his emails rest on Gmail’s servers.
That’s a lot of personal data Joe has on the web. And that’s true for a lot of us. And that data is only growing!
Challenges around your online personal data
Let’s talk about some challenges and concerns around online personal data:
- Ownership of your data: Do you really own your data if it resides on the computers of the service providers, walled by authentication mechanisms? What if you lose access to your passwords? What if the service providers lock you out?
- Data protection: How well is the service provider protecting your data from outside attacks, leaks and outages?
- Data privacy: What information is the service provider collecting about you? And what information is being passed on to third parties? It wasn’t just Facebook that peeked through your data — Cambridge Analytica saw it too!
In this article, we’re going to talk about ownership of your data.
Where is your data stored?
Your credit card data, conversations, private photos and more such personal data are scattered across services provided by tech giants like Google and Facebook. Here’s a gist of the products and services they own:
Can these tech giants restrict your access to your own data?
Let’s talk about Joe again.
The thought of never being able to access years’ worth of his personal data never really crosses his mind.
However, he would suffer great emotional and/or financial loss if, today, he got locked out of certain services.
A lot of internet users are like Joe.
Can these companies lock an average Joe out of his data on the internet?
In a nutshell, yes they can and they have.
Horror stories
Part 1 — Google
In the course of Google’s history, a lot of people have had their accounts deleted, with little or no success on recovery. What does having your Google account deleted mean? You lose access to Google Mail, Docs, Photos, YouTube, Calendar.. basically all Google products you used with that e-mail id.
They follow a zero tolerance policy and have no phone numbers to reach out to.
Perhaps a hacker got into your account and sent spammy e-mails that led to your account getting deleted. Or Google simply didn’t like something you did. Either way, you get no warning or communication on the WHY.
Your best bet is knowing the questions they ask on their recovery link BEFORE your account is deleted. Some of them are too obscure for you to remember unless you’ve jotted them down already.
Either that, or you regularly backup your data.
Part 2 — GitHub
While GitHub has a good reputation in the developer world, it is not bereft of lockout stories.
Developer Jason Rohrer lost access to 5 years’ worth of work when GitHub unexpectedly blocked him from all his repositories.
His experience is a reminder of the risks of depending on service providers for your data.
Here’s another account of Hamed Saeedi from Iran, whose account was blocked by GitHub for no valid reason. He had his work on it since 2012.
Part 3 — Twitter
Sumit Khanna had his account locked for violating Twitter’s rules for hateful conduct. The tweet they used to justify their action was from 10 years ago.
Twitter was probably running an algorithm to identify tweets that didn’t sit well with their current policies.
But trying to re-write the past at the cost of user’s data, old or new, only highlights how we should not be depending on services where we have little to no control over our content.
How to protect yourself against data loss
You can’t truly own your data as long as you continue using the services of these tech behemoths (maybe not even after you delete your account with them, read their policies).
You can, however, co-own it. To protect yourself from lockouts, the most prudent approach is to take regular back-ups of your online data.
“How do I back-up my online data?”
Almost all services provide the option to download all your personal data. This section is out of scope of this post. I will write about it in detail. Follow this space to stay updated. 😇
Meanwhile, here’s a little strip I made on “The Stages of Data Loss Grief”:
