Thanks for Sharing (Everything about Your Life)
When you take a second to think about it, there is an absolutely staggering amount of information about ourselves we’re voluntarily tossing into the ether on a daily basis. Most of us probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it and we operate under an implicit trust (or ignorance) of the power this information could hold in the wrong hands. The volume of digital data we generate about ourselves will never get smaller; that toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube. But we can stand up for the importance of our privacy by supporting entities that honor this sacred pact and shunning companies that show a callous disregard for it.
How many apps on your phone or laptop have you paid for? I forget where I heard it first, but here’s the basic idea… if you aren’t paying for the service — you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Your juicy data is being sold to whoever wants a piece. How many services do you trust with sensitive information that you don’t pay for and breezed through the T&Cs without thinking twice? Off the top of my head, apps that have collected zero direct revenue from me and that I share what could be sensitive information with on a daily basis include: Gmail, Google Maps, Waze, Snapchat, Evernote, Weather.com, DropBox, Venmo, and Medium (where you’re reading this now). The implications (respectively)? I’m sharing all of my acquaintances’ email addresses and phone numbers, my communications with them, receipts of every online purchase I make and service I subscribe to, constant tracking of my location, the pictures I take, my deepest personal thoughts, my professional notes and competitive information, pictures and files that are important enough for me to backup, my banking information and spending patterns, and the thoughts I’ve curated for public consumption. Damn…now that I type it all out, I’m realizing that I am seriously out there. And compared to the average consumer in my demographic, I probably skew towards the “Paranoid” end of the spectrum when it comes to how much I share and the need I feel to add layers of digital protection around my personal data.
We have little choice but to submit. I know my data is already compromised and trying to divorce myself from all this is essentially impossible in modern society. But I am willing to make unpopular choices. I choose not to share information through Facebook anymore because they have demonstrated constant and remorseless abuse of privacy. See this Ringer article for a nice cataloging of their repeated infractions. Facebook doesn’t give a shit about you; they are only invested in distilling everything you are into a digitized collection of datapoints to be marketed to or otherwise manipulated. I see no need to expound further — the facts are there in black and white.
Facebook isn’t the outlier here. They’re simply the best at what many of these companies are trying to do — synthesize and sell all the data we give to them for free to whoever thinks they can use it for whatever they want to use it for. I’ll give Apple credit for going to bat for the privacy of their customers and really everyone. I hope it’s not just lip service. Given the private life Tim Cook lived for many years before publicly coming out, I believe at least one leader of a very powerful and influential company has a healthy respect for keeping the intimate parts of our life private and our right to share our lives with who we want, how we want. I hope his voice and Apple’s actions as a company make a difference.
Perhaps it’s us, the consumers, who should be blamed for naively trusting that somewhere in those User Agreements is a viable paragraph about respecting boundaries. Maybe we’re greedy for expecting the great value these apps to be provided at no cost to us. If our worst fears about our compromised privacy are some day fully realized, as with Facebook’s infractions or the revelations Edward Snowden brought to light about the extent of the NSA’s spying on the private lives of citizens who do not represent national security threats, then it would seem to me it was a bit too easy to sign a deal with the Devil.
