Privacy- A Myth ft. Social Media
How end users become a product themselves
In an application if you see any ethical statements regarding privacy, personal data, know that it’s a joke. Even if we want it to be true, we all have to understand that it’s not the case. If the product is absolutely free then “You are the product”. Period.
Recently Apple launched iOS update 14.5 and Facebook was not really happy with this update. Confusing? Why is a social media company afraid of hardware, device manufacturing company?
Let’s understand this first.
Tracking personal info
Facebook is a social media company which earns 97% of its revenue from selling users data. And what does it have to do with OS update? Well iOS 14.5 update gives users a choice of not letting apps track your data across other apps, websites on your phone.
That means on android, and even on iPhone (before iOS 14.5 update) apps were tracking us without our notice 🤯. [Scam 1992 music playing in background]
Post 14.5 update, this permissions popup started appearing in such apps that I least expected.
Here’s a list of apps which asked for “tracking activity” permissions which in my opinion is unnecessary.
1. Airtel Mobile App
2. Dunzo
3. Hotstar
4. Zomato
5. Instagram (but obvious)
The hunger is not over yet. Instagram has a slightly different way of tackling this condition. They show you something like this before opening the above permissions popup.
This creates a FOMO feeling and sadly most of us would fall into this trap and give permissions blindly.
Personal opinion-
First of all, I am not on Instagram for personalized ads, so even if you don’t show me personalized ads, I don’t mind 😏. I am happy with memes 😉.
Secondly- If Instagram starts charging money, just because they can’t track me, it’s a pretty dangerous thing that you all must understand 🙂.
What about “activity tracking” permission for android users then?
Well Sadly, android users have no such “Not Track” choice so apps continue to track you across all the apps. Some custom made skin OS may give you an option but it’s not available on all devices.
Let us have a look at another permission which may get misused.
Local network device scan
Post iOS 14 launch, iOS users started getting a permission’s popup asking- “an app would like to find and connect to devices on your local network”.
A permission to connect with devices connected to the same network (WiFi). This is a privacy exploitation Android and iOS (before iOS 14) users are prone to.
What is this permission and what exactly does it do?
With this permission, apps can scan the local network you connect to for devices. For e.g.
1. a music streaming app can search for smart speaker devices
2. a printing app can scan for printers around
3. OTT platform to stream video to Chromecast or other devices
Above are the examples of requests you should allow.
However, some apps seem to request this access for unclear purposes. My personal user experience says- Truecaller, Udemy, Whatsapp these applications requested for this permission when first opened after an iOS 14 update.
Apps could theoretically use this feature to gather data on your network- for example, they could detect the smart devices on your network and use that information to enhance an advertising profile about you.
If you have no idea why a certain app needs this permission, I suggest you simply reject the request. This will also help protect your privacy, and restrict apps from getting as much information about your network and devices you own.
The serious concern over here is that Android users “still” neither have the option to restrict apps from tracking personally identifiable information nor they can restrict apps from scanning the devices around. Adding to it, the majority of the world’s smartphones are android based. We can only hope for such privacy updates in android OS because guess what? It is owned by an Advertising Giant.
In the world where it is believed that “Data is the new oil”, are we really aware of the data being stolen behind our back?
In the upcoming part of this blog we will be covering tools which can be used for protecting your privacy and also reducing your impressions on the web.
Stay tuned for the next blog, on coming Sunday.
