Your Data Are Your Freedom
How privacy isn't easy to get nowadays, and why you must improve on that
We give away a lot of data about ourselves these days.
On social media, when we fill out our profile and tell about our family relations, pets, blood group, and favorite color, just to name some of what is commonly asked.
When we are paying for something with our payment or credit card, perhaps using a customer club card as well, thereby filling up the data collecting databases with details about where, what, and how much we buy, and perhaps even something about what else we looked at but didn’t buy.
When we use public transportation and pay with our electronic ticket – in the mobile phone or as a chip card.
When we just move around in the streets or at home, being caught on surveillance cameras.
When we use electronic keys or other identification to get through doors or register for a place in an electronic queue, or when identifying to prove that we are 18 or 21 or whatever is needed for buying or doing what we are about to.
And when using the Internet in any way, leaving a trace behind us that can be used to reconstruct most of what we have thought about, seen, and done during those hours each day when we do that.
When we use email programs, especially from Google, who officially admit that they index the contents of your emails and use the information for creating targeted advertising for you, and other purposes. So, they read your emails, effectively, and share what they learn with third parties.
When couriers and carriers are transporting anything from or to us.
When our faces or fingerprints are recognized by any device we use.
When we switch on the TV, which has a user’s account for us that we must log into in order to use the TV itself, and additional accounts for each cable TV service or whatever we use with the device. And everything we push there, what we do with it – keeping a certain program on, and for how long, returning patterns of use, and, as an extreme, but it has happened in real life: the TV filming you and recording sounds from your room through the built-in camera and microphone, even when you knew nothing about these mechanisms being there in the first place.
And so on.
Almost every device we use register things about us, and they know who we are – because they all require us to register and identify ourselves.
It has been shown that many mobile phone apps, and various malware on computers can switch on the camera and microphone – even without lighting the LED that should tell about that, and without asking you, or even letting you know. They can then spy on you.
Recently, the EU had a meeting that, for my first time, was described as being held in their “bunker” – a special room in the basement, without windows and without any electronics in the room.
With no electronics and no way to film or record sound through windows, it should be relatively safe against spying. Of course, the people in the room could potentially be spies themselves, but with sufficient clearing and monitoring, this risk could possibly be reduced.
Without such a room, you will be spied upon. It’s that simple. It happens all the time.
Apart from the evil-minded spying, there’s also the softer kind, which is simply the functional recording by apps of what you do with them. For a text processor, it makes sense that it remembers which characters you write, since that’s the whole purpose of the app, but it is also practical that it keeps track of menu items clicked, etc., so that you can benefit from an undo function.
But what happens to all such registrations afterward? You have your document ready, it’s been saved in a file – will the text processor still keep the data? And where? And who will get access to them?
Most big software vendors have some kind of spying program in place, which can be possible to switch off, but it isn’t always clear that it exists and is on in the first place – and then it can be difficult to switch it off, and know (and trust) that it has been done.
The vendors claim that it is for gathering information to be used for improving the software. What do they consider improving the software? Could the exchange of your data with other companies or organizations be part of that?
And you know, of course, that when you tell an AI engine, no matter where it is, about all your secrets, it will keep them? Not as secrets, though, but as data, to be used for whatever purpose the company behind it may find attractive…
Lots of mechanisms are in place for tracking you through your use of software and web services, even where you are not logged in, to get a bigger picture of who you are and what you do. Cookies are part of that game.
Webshops, social media, and every other service you use, including those you don’t even know about, because they are used behind the scenes, either on your device or on a server somewhere, all gather information for similar purposes.
And many of them are eager to make money on what they have gathered, by selling it off to other companies – to be used in big data analytics.
Viruses, trojans, ransomware and other malware – there’s a lot of it, and most of it leads to leaking your data to people who are not friendly-minded.
Well, that’s more or less how it goes, with all the electronics. “Big tech” is always blamed for their lack of ethics and moral in this game, but also governments and smaller fishes, and some criminal organizations, are taking part in the feast on your data.
There are ways of limiting the spying activities, but they are not easy to carry through when using a smartphone from Apple or Google, and there are hardly any others (I know that most Android phones are not directly from Google, but they are used as terminals for collecting your data by Google just the same).
To get anywhere, and still have a smartphone, you need to go Goggle-free and Apple-free. I recently learned that this is a thing, but there are actually phones available that use different platforms and still give you access to emails, a variety of apps, and all what you normally do with a smartphone.
One company, producing such phones and tablets, is Volla. They are based in Germany, and their devices are equipped with their own operating system plus Ubuntu Linux in a dual-boot setup, and a set of apps that are all open source and chosen for their non-intrusive behavior toward your data.
There might be other phone companies like this, and using a device of that kind will definitely reduce the collection of data. However, the mobile operators will still register your position and traffic through their service, and they will hand it out to authorities according to the rules and regulations in place in each country, but at least, this kind of data usually doesn’t end up with arbitrary businesses or criminal organizations.
Even computers can be equipped with an OS and application software that has a similar nature, thereby not stealing your data. Worth considering how you can arrange this, because Apple, Google, and Microsoft will for sure steal your data – that’s their business model.
Another aspect, though, is actually much worse!
How can it get worse, you might ask, when you just heard that almost everything at all times is being grabbed and stolen from you (unless you have a Volla phone, of course, and an open source OS on your computer)?
Well, it’s called social engineering. It works even without any electronics. In its essence, it is just other people talking to you, or talking to others about you, thereby getting bunches of information about you or something you know about.
Social engineering takes place all the time, and as Paul Neumann, security expert and the author of a new book called exactly “Social Engineering” (find it at Google Play), explains: it’s nothing new. It has taken place at all times, because people are usually the weakest link, and even if computers, smartphones, cameras, etc., can be used for spying on you, then you yourself and your friends are probably even better sources of information – through social hacking, as it’s also called.
While I’ll advise people to start looking at how they are being spied upon through hardware, I’ll definitely also advise taking a look at Paul’s book to get some insight in how social hacking works, and what you can do to limit the harm it can cause.
Because, that’s the point of it all – to reduce the harm done.
What can possibly go wrong by letting people know what you buy and where you have been at a certain time, etc.?
Well, there’s identity theft. A very serious risk, where someone can behave like if they are you, taking a job in your name (I have seen this in real life, so it’s not hypothetical), take out money from your bank account, take over your house, have you thrown out of it as if you were an intruder (this often happens in Sweden!), and quite many other things that, at times, look like they were taken out of a horror movie.
Then there’s the category of job secrets – spying on you may reveal something about your work and workplace, making it possible to get information that will spoil business opportunities for your company, or reveal its strategies so it will lose a competitive advantage, to name some areas.
In a similar way, you and your information can be used to get to some people you know: friends, families, colleagues, and spy on them – or hurt or harm them in some other way.
And for a much larger context, spies can use your data together with data from many others to profile a country or another larger area or group of people and plan for terrorist attacks or war activities.
So, when saying that your data is your freedom, I’m not overstating! On the contrary: your data may be part of the freedom and safety of quite many people, including your own.
Data security is not just a matter of not revealing your password to your work computer – it’s a matter of arranging your life so that you are in control of your data, no matter what you do, and so that you won’t easily be tricked into handing them out voluntarily.
Your data are your freedom – if you can keep them where they belong: with you!