5 Things you Believe about Privacy that aren’t True

Published in

NetCloak

3 min readSep 7, 2018

With news about online privacy and data breaches becoming more of an everyday occurrence, we should not take privacy for granted. In fact, you probably have a family member, friend, or colleague who is your go-to person for privacy information. It can be easy to talk about protecting your online privacy, but how can you be sure that what you’re doing is enough? In this post, we go over some common misconceptions about data privacy.

1. I have nothing to hide

While Google’s CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt stated: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”1 You might think that you have nothing to hide, but you probably wouldn’t appreciate a stranger looking over your shoulder all the time or snooping through your mailbox either. Today, everything about you is sold to the highest bidder, from your shopping habits to how often you go to the gym. For example, in 2017 each Facebook user was worth an average of $20.212 to the right people. Having the ‘nothing to hide’ mindset allows others to exploit your information.

2. All I need is one strong password

Although a strong password can stop someone from guessing their way into your account, it won’t stop a hacker who got it from a data breach or that one time you typed your password into that fake (but really convincing) email login page. Even worse, reusing your password increases the risk of a hacker accessing your other accounts. A good way to mitigate this is by using a different password for every account. Moreover, having an effective password manager will save you the trouble of having to memorize every single complex password.

3. Incognito and private browsing keeps me safe

Today’s popular web browsers all have a private browsing mode. Unfortunately, just because you use this mode doesn’t mean that people can’t find out what you are browsing. Whether you are at home, work or school, all of your activity can still be tracked by your employer and your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Without a Virtual Private Network (VPN), private browsing only serves to provide users with a false sense of privacy

4. I’m safe because all my social media is locked down

You can do everything in your power and follow all the proper guidelines to protect yourself online, but unless your family and friends to also do the same, you are still vulnerable. All it takes is one post, one photo of you, or one mention from your friends and family to compromise your own privacy. The path to effective privacy needs to be a shared effort.

5. Protecting myself takes too much time and effort

It is impossible to achieve complete privacy without isolating yourself virtually and physically, but securing your privacy shouldn’t be hard. Tools such as a VPN and ad blockers can help you maintain your privacy while online. The right to privacy should be universal, respected, and simple to achieve. At NetCloak, we’re building software that automatically protects and manages your privacy. Come sign up for our upcoming beta at https://netcloak.io.

References: