Another week, another massive privacy scandal. When it’s not Facebook admitting it allowed data on as many as 87 million users to be sucked out by a developer on its platform who sold it to a political consultancy working for the Trump campaign, or dating app Grindr ‘fessing up to sharing its users’ HIV status with third party A/B testers, some other ugly facet of the tech industry’s love affair with tracking everything its users do slides into view.
Suddenly, Android users discover to their horror that Google’s mobile platform tells the company where they are all the time — thanks to baked-in location tracking bundled with Google services like Maps and Photos. Or Amazon Echo users realize Jeff Bezos’ ecommerce empire has amassed audio recordings of every single interaction they’ve had with their cute little smart speaker.
The problem, as ever with the tech industry’s teeny-weeny greyscaled legalise, is that the people it refers to as “users” aren’t genuinely consenting to having their information sucked into the cloud for goodness knows what. Because they haven’t been given a clear picture of what agreeing to share their data will really mean.
Instead one or two select features, with a mote of user benefit, tend to be presented at the point of sign up — to socially engineer ‘consent’. Then the company can walk away with a defacto license to perpetually harvest that person’s data by claiming that a consent box was once ticked.
A great example of that is Facebook’s Nearby Friends. The feature lets you share your position with your friends so — and here’s that shiny promise — you can more easily hang out with them. But do you know anyone who is actively using this feature? Yet millions of people started sharing their exact location with Facebook for a feature that’s now buried and mostly unused. Meanwhile Facebook is actively using your location to track your offline habits so it can make money targeting you with adverts.
Terms & Conditions are the biggest lie in the tech industry, as we’ve written before. (And more recently: It was not consent, it was concealment.)
Senator Kennedy of Louisiana also made the point succinctly to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this week, telling him to his face: “Your user agreement sucks.” We couldn’t agree more.
Happily disingenuous T&Cs are on borrowed time — at least for European tech users, thanks to a new European Union data protection framework that will come into force next month. The GDPR tightens consent requirements — mandating clear and accurate information be provided to users at the point of sign up. Data collection is also more tightly tied to specific function.
From next month, holding onto personal data without a very good reason to do so will be far more risky — because GDPR is also backed up with a regime of supersized fines that are intended to make privacy rules much harder to ignore.
Of course U.S. tech users can’t bank on benefiting from European privacy regulations. And while there are now growing calls in the country for legislation to protect people’s data — in a bid to steer off the next democracy-denting Cambridge Analytica scandal, at very least — any such process will take a lot of political will.
It certainly will not happen overnight. And you can expect tech giants to fight tooth and nail against laws being drafted and passed — as indeed Facebook, Google and others lobbied fiercely to try to get GDPR watered down.
Facebook has already revealed it will not be universally applying the European regulation — which means people in North America are likely to get a degree of lower privacy than Facebook users everywhere else in the world. Which doesn’t exactly sound fair.
When it comes to privacy, some of you may think you have nothing to hide. But that’s a straw man. It’s especially hard to defend this line of thinking now that big tech companies have attracted so much soft power they can influence elections, inflame conflicts and divide people in general. It’s time to think about the bigger impact of technology on the fabric of society, and not just your personal case.
Shifting the balance
So what can Internet users do right now to stop tech giants, advertisers and unknown entities tracking everything you do online — and trying to join the dots of your digital activity to paint a picture of who they think you are? At least, everything short of moving to Europe, where privacy is a fundamental right.
There are some practical steps you can take to limit day-to-day online privacy risks by reducing third party access to your information and shielding more of your digital activity from prying eyes.
Not all these measures are appropriate for every person. It’s up to you to determine how much effort you want (or need) to put in to shield your privacy.
You may be happy to share a certain amount of personal data in exchange for access to a certain service, for example. But even then it’s unlikely that the full trade-off has been made clear to you. So it’s worth asking yourself if you’re really getting a good deal.
Once people’s eyes are opened to the fine-grained detail and depth of personal information being harvested, even some very seasoned tech users have reacted with shock — saying they had no idea, for example, that Facebook Messenger was continuously uploading their phone book and logging their calls and SMS metadata.
This is one of the reasons why the U.K.’s information commissioner has been calling for increased transparency about how and why data flows. Because for far too long tech savvy entities have been able to apply privacy hostile actions in the dark. And it hasn’t really been possible for the average person to know what’s being done with their information. Or even what data they are giving up when they click ‘I agree’.
Why does an A/B testing firm need to know a person’s HIV status? Why does a social network app need continuous access to your call history? Why should an ad giant be able to continuously pin your movements on a map?
Are you really getting so much value from an app that you’re happy for the company behind it and anyone else they partner with to know everywhere you go, everyone you talk to, the stuff you like and look at — even to have a pretty good idea what you’re thinking?
Every data misuse scandal shines a bit more light on some very murky practices — which will hopefully generate momentum for rule changes to disinfect data handling processes and strengthen individuals’ privacy by spotlighting trade-offs that have zero justification.
With some effort — and good online security practices (which we’re taking as a given for the purposes of this article, but one quick tip: Enable 2FA everywhere you can) — you can also make it harder for the web’s lurking watchers to dine out on your data.
Just don’t expect the lengths you have to go to protect your privacy to feel fair or just — the horrible truth is this fight sucks.
But whatever you do, don’t give up.
How to hide on the internet
Action: Tape over all your webcams
Who is this for: Everyone — even Mark Zuckerberg!
How difficult is it: Easy peasy lemon squeezy
Tell me more: You can get fancy removable stickers for this purpose (noyb has some nice ones). Or you can go DIY and use a bit of masking tape — on your laptop, your smartphone, even your smart TV… If your job requires you to be on camera, such as for some conference calls, and you want to look a bit more pro you can buy a webcam cover. Sadly locking down privacy is rarely this easy.
Action: Install HTTPS Everywhere
Who is this for: Everyone — seriously do it
How difficult is it: Mild effort
Tell me more: Many websites offer encryption. With HTTPS, people running the network between your device and the server hosting the website you’re browsing can’t see your requests and your internet traffic. But some websites still load unencrypted pages by default (HTTP), which also causes a security risk. The EFF has developed a browser extension that makes sure that you access all websites that offer HTTPS using… HTTPS.
Action: Use tracker blockers
Who is this for: Everyone — except people who like being ad-stalked online
How difficult is it: Mild effort
Tell me more: Trackers refers to a whole category of privacy-hostile technologies designed to follow and record what web users are doing as they move from site to site, and even across different devices. Trackers come in a range of forms these days. And there are some pretty sophisticated ways of being tracked (some definitely harder to thwart than others). But to combat trackers being deployed on popular websites — which are probably also making the pages slower to load than they otherwise would be — there’s now a range of decent, user-friendly tracker blockers to choose from. Pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo recently added a tracker blocker to their browser extensions, for example. Disconnect.me is also a popular extension to block trackers from third-party websites. Firefox also has a built-in tracker blocker, which is now enabled by default in the mobile apps. If you’re curious and want to see the list of trackers on popular website, you can also install Kimetrak to understand that it’s a widespread issue.
Action: Use an ad blocker
Who is this for: Everyone who can support the moral burden
How difficult is it: Fairly easy these days but you might be locked out of the content on some news websites as a result
Tell me more: If you’ve tried using a tracker blocker, you may have noticed that many ads have been blocked in the process. That’s because most ads load from third-party servers that track you across multiple sites. So if you want to go one step further and block all ads, you should install an ad blocker. Some browsers like Opera come with an ad blocker. Otherwise, we recommend uBlock Origin on macOS, Windows, Linux and Android. 1Blocker is a solid option on iOS.
But let’s be honest, TechCrunch makes some money with online ads. If 100% of web users install an ad blocker many websites you know and love would simply go bankrupt. While your individual choice won’t have a material impact on the bottom line, consider whitelisting the sites you like. And if you’re angry at how many trackers your favorite news site is running try emailing them to ask (politely) if they can at least reduce the number of trackers they use.
Action: Make a private search engine your default
Who is this for: Most people
How difficult is it: A bit of effort because your search results might become slightly less relevant
Tell me more: Google probably knows more about you than even Facebook does, thanks to the things you tell it when you type queries into its search engine. Though that’s just the tip of how it tracks you — if you use Android it will keep running tabs on everywhere you go unless you opt out of location services. It also has its tracking infrastructure embedded on three-quarters of the top million websites. So chances are it’s following what you’re browsing online — unless you also take steps to lock down your browsing (see below).
But one major way to limit what Google knows about you is to switch to using an alternative search engine when you need to look something up on the Internet. This isn’t as hard as it used to be as there are some pretty decent alternatives now — such as DuckDuckGo which Apple will let you set as the default browser on iOS — or Qwant for French-speaking users. German users can check out Cliqz. You will also need to remember to be careful about any voice assistants you use as they often default to using Google to look stuff up on the web.
Action: Use private browser sessions
Who is this for: Most people
How difficult is it: Not at all if you understand what a private session is
Tell me more: All browsers on desktop and mobile now let you open a private window. While this can be a powerful tool, it is often misunderstood. By default, private sessions don’t make you more invisible — you’ll get tracked from one tab to another. But private sessions let you start with a clean slate. Every time you close your private session, all your cookies are erased. It’s like you disappear from everyone’s radar. You can then reopen another private session and pretend that nobody knows who you are. That’s why using a private session for weeks or months doesn’t do much, but short private sessions can be helpful.
Action: Use multiple browsers and/or browser containers
Who is this for: People who don’t want to stop using social media entirely
How difficult is it: Some effort to not get in a muddle
Tell me more: Using different browsers for different online activities can be a good way of separating portions of your browsing activity. You could, for example, use one browser on your desktop computer for your online banking, say, and a different browser for your social networking or ecommerce activity. Taking this approach further, you could use different mobile devices when you want to access different apps. The point of dividing your browsing across different browsers/devices is to try to make it harder to link all your online activity to you. That said, lots of adtech effort has been put into developing cross-device tracking techniques — so it’s not clear that fragmenting your browsing sessions will successful beat all the trackers.
In a similar vein, in 2016 Mozilla added a feature to its Firefox browser that’s intended to help web users segregate online identities within the same browser — called multi container extensions. This approach gives users some control but it does not stop their browser being fingerprinted and all their web activity in it linked and tracked. It may help reduce some cookie-based tracking, though.
Last month Mozilla also updated the container feature to add one that specifically isolates a Facebook user’s identity from the rest of the web. This limits how Facebook can track a user’s non-Facebook web browsing — which yes Facebook does do, whatever Zuckerberg tried to claim in Congress — so again it’s a way to reduce what the social network giant knows about you. (Though it should also be noted that clicking on any Facebook social plug-ins you encounter on other websites will still send Facebook your personal data.)
Action: Get acquainted with Tor
Who is this for: Activists, people with high risks attached to being tracked online, committed privacy advocates who want to help grow the Tor network
How difficult is it: Patience is needed to use Tor. Also some effort to ensure you don’t accidentally do something that compromises your anonymity
Tell me more: For the most robust form of anonymous web browsing there’s Tor. Tor’s onion network works by encrypting and routing your Internet traffic randomly through a series of relay servers to make it harder to link a specific device with a specific online destination. This does mean it’s definitely not the fastest form of web browsing around. Some sites can also try to block Tor users so the Internet experience you get when browsing in this way may suffer. But it’s the best chance of truly preserving your online anonymity. You’ll need to download the relevant Tor browser bundle to use it. It’s pretty straightforward to install and get going. But expect very frequent security updates which will also slow you down.
Action: Switch to another DNS
Who is this for: People who don’t trust their ISP
How difficult is it: Moderately
Tell me more: When you type an address in the address bar (such as techcrunch.com), your device asks a Domain Name Server to translate that address into an IP address (a unique combination of numbers and dots). By default, your ISP or your mobile carrier runs a DNS for their users. It means that they can see all your web history. Big telecom companies are going to take advantage of that to ramp up their advertising efforts. By default, your DNS query is also unencrypted and can be intercepted by people running the network. Some governments also ask telecom companies to block some websites on their DNS servers — some countries block Face
source https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/14/how-to-save-your-privacy-from-the-internets-clutches/
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