The “I have nothing to hide” Myth
The conversation with my car mechanic somehow led us to the topic of online privacy:
- I have nothing to hide; I work hard every day and don’t break any laws!
— he said in a louder than usual voice, apparently with the hope to earn some “extra credit” if an authority indeed was listening. It was funny; but seriously, why should you be concerned about privacy if you’re not doing anything illegal? We all have information we don’t want to share with the public: social security number, bank account information, medical records, and much more. There is good reason to safeguard it.
Did you know that it only takes 500 euros to ruin someone’s life?
It is just one of many shady services offered on the dark web and only requires the name and address of the victim — information we so readily share with all kinds of apps and social networks. The “black hat” hackers then plant illegal materials like drugs or child pornography in the victim’s car or house, maybe even directly on the computer, and throw an anonymous tip to authorities. Good luck in jail, it won’t be an easy time with such charges.
Of course, companies that gather information about you don’t mean to hurt you. They merely want to make money by selling you more stuff; however, despite the benign intentions, this sometimes leads to trouble: back in 2012, a young woman purchased from Target some vitamins, cotton balls and lotion. Based on her previous purchases, Target’s algorithm correctly determined that she was pregnant and started mailing coupons for baby items. The young woman was still a teenager, and the coupons alerted her father who didn’t take the news too well.
Unfortunately, the situation hasn’t improved since 2012 but in fact has gotten worse. Selling data has become a very lucrative business. Free services collect, process, and package users’ information turning users themselves into a product to be bought and sold. Even private messages are not private anymore: according to The Guardian’s investigation, Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read and even remove users’ private messages. And Google still allows third-party developers to read emails of Gmail users. The company claims its rules prohibit 3rd parties from storing and sharing users’ emails.
Even anonymized data which is supposed to be safe is not safe at all. Almost everyone has searched their own name on the internet and about 30% of internet users have searched their social security number to check if it comes up somewhere. A simple algorithm can quickly analyze the search history and associate the name with the social security number. Material published about de-anonymization enable anyone to connect the dots and obtain a full dossier from seemingly safe, anonymized data.
Targeted advertisement is only one of many ways to utilize social media platforms. June 2014, Facebook with academics from Cornell and the University of California published a study about an experiment where users’ news feeds were manipulated to disproportionately display positive or negative posts. The experiment demonstrated that those users who Facebook served with more positive content made more positive posts, while the ones who got negative content likewise made more negative posts. The implied ability to influence users’ dispositions and decisions is disturbing, considering that Facebook is the primary source of news for millions of people.
So they sell my data, what’s the big deal, anyway?
There is a strong relationship between data collection and data breaches, which leads to:
- hacked accounts
- unapproved purchases
- identity theft
- blackmail
- and more…
Aforementioned Target got breached, leaking personal data of 110 million people; Uber leaked information for 57 million users and instead of reporting the stolen data, as required by law, paid hackers $100K to keep the leak secret. Facebook was breached multiple times, leaking hundreds of millions of records. Ashley Madison — the online dating service for people in relationships, was hacked in 2015. Perpetrators were able to steal emails, names, sexual fantasies, and digital correspondence of the users. The data was made public on the internet by the hackers, which presented an opportunity for all sorts of scum to use it to blackmail the victims. There are reports of 3 unconfirmed suicides related to this leak and a $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the hackers was announced.
About 8 billion accounts are hacked every year, which means there is a high chance that at least some of your accounts are compromised. Regaining online privacy is not a simple switch and certainly is harder than it used to be. However, it is possible, starting from disabling internet trackers to having your own email server (those aren’t only for the politicians). Keep an eye out for the follow-up articles; we will regain our privacy together, step by step.
