You’ve been told in the past that you lose control of your personal
data when you use free services like Facebook, Google or Instagram.
I’m here to tell you that’s a big fat lie.
Nowadays, most of us PAY for products and services that assume ownership of
our data. That new car you bought? Yea, it’s collecting data about your driving
habits and sending it to the car manufacturer or insurance company. That Alexa device you
purchased to use in your home? It’s uploading every word you say to Amazon’s servers.
The Ring camera system? Your Smart TV? Your robot vacuum? Your mobile phone?
Control of your data is no longer determined by whether or not you
pay for a product or service. It’s now determined by who cares about it the
most. I want you to care about who controls your data, because guess what? You’ve got
more power than you realize to take back ownership of what is rightfully yours.
Welcome to All Things Secured, my name is Josh, and my goal here is to clearly explain how your
personal information ends up outside of your control and what you can do about the data
that’s already out there. And if you stick with me to the end of this video, I’ll give you three
very specific changes you can make to keep your private information private going forward. This
video is being sponsored by DeleteMe, which is one of the tools I use and recommend to remove
my personal information online. There’s a link and discount code in the description,
but more on that in a moment. For now, let’s answer this deceptively difficult question:
how did we get to this point where the internet is littered with all of our personal information?
The road that has led us to this dystopian data society was paved with mostly good intentions.
Smart speakers, smart TVs, wearables and other such devices were designed
to make our lives easier. Even the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook
started as a fun personality quiz created by a University of Cambridge psychology professor.
It’s easy to point fingers at big tech companies like Google and Amazon, who
admittedly love to collect our data, but there are really four different ways that our data
gets released: voluntary exposure, obligatory disclosure, data scraping and activity tracking.
Voluntary exposure is basically the stuff you share online without anybody forcing
you to do so. That photo you just posted on Instagram for the world to see? That dating
profile you filled out? That Facebook group you joined? All of that is voluntary exposure.
And don’t hear me wrong - I’m not saying that all of this is bad. You just need to
understand how much control they give up by how much you publicly share,
voluntarily. It’s not about deleting your social media or going off the grid, it’s simply about
being aware of how much you’re sharing and how that could affect you down the road.
That public photo of you and your kid or you and your grandkid paints a big
fat target on your back that scammers can use to socially manipulate you.
Aside from limiting how much you share, the best thing you can do - and you’ve
probably heard me say this before - is to make sure that all your social media
is private. If you have public profiles up elsewhere, for example on LinkedIn,
a dating site or some other website, make sure that you only share what is absolutely necessary.
Voluntary exposure is somewhat easier to control. But what about obligator disclosure?
There are so many times in our lives where we are forced to give over information that we
would rather not give. Perhaps you want to use a cool new budgeting app, but in order to do that,
you’re forced to connect your bank via Plaid, and you have no option but to share account names,
account numbers and a bunch of other information. Maybe you’re filling out
some kind of application that asks for all sorts of random information that they think
is required. Or - and this one frustrates me - you get asked to put in your email
address so that a business can email a receipt and “save the planet”. [eye roll]
So there are two things I want to point out about this. First, what I’ve learned
over many years of dealing with this stuff is that often what is listed as “required” isn’t
actually required. Don’t be afraid to say “no” or to at least politely ask why such
information would be required. When you start doing this, you might be surprised how many
times the reply will be a simple “Ok, thanks.” If it’s absolutely necessary, they’ll won’t let
you proceed without providing the info, but often you’re asked for more than is needed.
Second, because we want to have control over our own data, when we give it over to somebody else,
we’re having to trust that they’re going to take good care of it. And if you listen
to the Surveillance Report podcast and all the new data breaches they share each week,
you’ll know that even the biggest companies can’t take care of your data.
So what’s the solution? You need to learn to mask the information that you’re required to
give out. In past videos, I’ve talked about how to mask your home address,
your phone number, and your credit card number. I’ll leave links to each of these videos below,
so I won’t go into detail about each of those here.
The next two ways that we lose control of our data are more insidious. The first is
data scraping. Your data can be scraped from so many different places, but you can usually
thank your local government for most of this one. Real estate records, driving records,
criminal records, immigration records - all of these are public records often published
by your government and there are plenty of services online that are more than happy to
scrape that information to create a profile on you without your knowledge or consent.
It’s alarming just how easy it is for me to do research on somebody that I’m about to meet and
get a pretty good idea of their income level, their property value, and any criminal record.
I could probably even find your address, phone number and relatives without breaking a sweat.
Now sure, you could spend the time and money to put your house in a
trust and to hire an online reputation consultant,
but for most people - at least those in the United States - I recommend having a
service like DeleteMe make legal data removal requests from all of these scraping services.
Just over the past 10 months, they’ve removed my name, address,
property records and occupation from 35 different data brokers that were selling
that online. It gives me great peace of mind knowing that they’re constantly monitoring the
internet for my personal information and then aggressively following up with removal notices.
As you move toward a greater awareness of online security, why not take advantage
of their offer to give you 20% off when you use the code ATS at checkout. You’ll
probably be shocked at how much of your data DeleteMe will find and remove online.
Finally, after voluntary exposure, obligatory disclosure, and data scraping,
one final way that our data gets exposed without our knowledge is activity tracking.
If you use Chrome, even in incognito mode, your browsing activity is being tracked.
Every purchase you make online is being tracked. Your phone GPS is being tracked by various apps.
Often, we give consent to this tracking without knowing,
but a lot of times it happens whether or not we agree to it.
Ok, you’ve made it this far in the video, so I want to make sure you have some practical
changes you can make. I promised you three of them at the top of this video, so here they are.
First, I recommend that you set aside 10 minutes today to
walk through the privacy settings on your phone. For both Android and iOS,
you’ll find that in your settings app under “Privacy”. Which apps get to see your GPS
location? Bluetooth? What about the camera or microphone? Unless you can give me a good
reason why they need that data, you should probably remove an app’s right to access it.
Second, find ways to monitor your data. You can pay for a monitoring service like DeleteMe which
I’ve already talked about, but if you refuse to spend the money, you can also set Google
Alerts to find when your name, address or phone number pop up online. You never know where it
will appear and at least if you’re aware of it you can make a request to have it taken down.
Finally, I recommend you take steps to reduce your digital footprint. This means deleting
apps or programs that you don’t use, closing down accounts you don’t log into anymore and switching
to more privacy-focused options for email, internet browsing, cloud storage and more.
If this is something you’re interested to learn more about, I’m creating more
and more video content addressing these issues that you can watch here.