Who knows how long back they track right? So let me go back...
a few years to 2017.
So I can see that I went to Eastpoint Mall to have
lunch I even have pictures that don't even exist in this phone anymore.
Whoa!
It shows me every single shop I went into!
That is insane!
Apps can track our locations searches personal preferences and even recognize our faces.
But how much of this personal information are we really giving to tech
companies and what happens if it falls into the wrong hands?
Here are some ways you may be tracked when using some of your favorite apps.
Like most people I use Google Maps all the time and I rely on it heavily.
But did you know that it tracks everywhere you've ever been!
Get ready to have your mind blown.
So this feature is called Google Maps
timeline and to access this you just click on the little button with your face
on it and go to your timeline.
So it shows you like where you've been.
So say let's go back to earlier this year pre-pandemic, January 29th.
Okay, so I was still living in New York
at that point in time you can see that I've gone from home walking to
school walking back home and all I did was take photos of myself
and my books like this is just my whole life.
And then you can see the route that I walk to school.
You can even see where within the school I went.
Entered the bookstore...
went to campus, went to the café come back.
I don't remember turning this on so to
the best of my knowledge this is on by default.
And who knows how long back they track right so let me go back
a few years to 2017.
Okay, so I can see that I went to Eastpoint Mall to have lunch.
I even have pictures that don't even exist in this phone anymore.
Photos of myself having lunch at Pizza Hut.
Plaza Sing... WHOA!
Plaza Sing and not only does it show me that I was in Plaza Sing it shows me every single
shop I went into.
so I went to Dhoby Ghaut Station,
went to Nana's Green Tea,
went to Tim Ho Wan, went to Golden Village Plaza to watch a movie,
came out and ate Korean BBQ, went to Cold Storage, went to Muji and went to the train station to go home.
That is insane!
I knew that it tracked like the
locations that I went to and what mode I went by so it would tell you if you
drove you took a train and you walked but I didn't know that they tracked
literally every shop within a shopping mall
So that kind of blows my mind.
And also it's a little bit embarrassing
because it says I was at Plaza Singapura from 2:19pm to 10pm.
I spent 8 hours in the mall!
So I guess it depends on whether or not you feel
comfortable with them tracking your data all the time.
I personally don't mind because my memory is not very good so I actually
use it to remember where I was on a certain day
especially when I'm you know like writing up a blog post when I travel I
want to know which locations I visited and I forgot like
what my route was
So I actually use it to pull up data from that.
But if you're not comfortable with it you can turn it off anytime.
So how that works is you just go to your Google account,
click your data in maps and you can find your location history
where you can see and delete all of your past activity or just turn it off so it
no longer tracks your location.
So you may be wondering why does Google
even need all this data on me?
Well it's to give you a more
personalized experience.
From the app it says how Maps uses location data is
if you enable location history with your Google account, Google maps can help you
look up where you previously visited and offer new
personalized suggestions.
And another aspect of this
is serving you more personalized ads.
So how ads on Maps work
is when you search for nearby businesses on Google Maps such as coffee shops near me,
you may see locally relevant
advertisements that feature businesses.
You will see ad written near the name of
the business in your search results.
I guess what this means is Google Maps
uses a variety of signals to ensure that you only see ads that are relevant to
you in this moment.
It doesn't really bother
me so much to have personalize ads so I wouldn't turn it off but if it
bothers you the option is always there.
And something
else that's pretty important is that Google says that your timeline is
private so only you can see it.
So many of you probably don't know this
but Facebook can monitor what you're doing even when you're not on Facebook.
Tt's a feature that's on by default and it's called off-Facebook activity
So what is off-Facebook activity?
So this is basically a summary of activity that
businesses share with Facebook.
So interactions like when you visited
their website or when you logged in to a website using Facebook, they send the
information to Facebook and Facebook uses it to personalize your experience.
I don't know how useful this is because I don't really pay that much attention
to ads but when I do it's because I bought
something like I bought a bag and then they immediately served me the
ads for that same bag and I'm like hello? I already purchased it.
I already gave you the money.
So if you want to turn off your off-Facebook activity
you just have to go to Facebook, go to your profile, go to your settings and
privacy, click settings, go all the way down to
off-Facebook activity which is under your Facebook information
and turn it off.
So I have turned off my future off-Facebook activities so in the
future anything I do hopefully doesn't get sent to Facebook.
So I turned off my off-Facebook activity a while ago but I checked with a friend
who didn't know about it until now and she had 1214 websites and apps that
have shared her activity with Facebook.
So honestly, turning off my off-Facebook activity
hasn't really affected my user experience beyond the fact
that now when I try to log into other apps using the Facebook login,
it keeps prompting me to turn on my off-Facebook activity which is mildly
annoying but not annoying enough for me to turn it back on.
Okay, so now I want to talk about data breaches.
A data breach is basically when
your confidential information like your credit confirmation or your passwords
has been exposed to the public.
I found two very useful sites that can
help you check if your account has been compromised in a data breach.
So the first one that we're going to look at is Google's password manager.
So according to Google, Google takes all the account details
saved on the device and checks them against the same google internal database.
So if the user's details have been leaked or compromised in a data
breach, Google will warn the user that it's time
to change the password for the account.
So I'm going to check my account right now.
I will go to password checkup
So check the security of passwords you
saved your google account learn if they were compromised see how strong they are
and if you've used any passwords more than once.
So checking your save pass... I have 37 compromised passwords and
they're like change these passwords now.
It says that these accounts are using
passwords that were exposed in a third-party data breach.
They are at risk.
Change them now and never use them again.
so things like VSCO, Circles, Lala Move, Mc Delivery
Okay so it doesn't mean that these websites necessarily were the ones that
had a data breach.
What it means is that I used the same
username and password combination in the different website and that
website got hacked so according to Google
compromise password and username combinations are unsafe because they
have already been published online.
We recommend that you change any
compromised passwords as soon as you can.
So it says here they have 149 reuse
passwords and they are prompting me to create unique passwords for every single one.
But honestly who has the brain space to
come up with 149 unique passwords and remember every single one of them?
I guess that's why people like me are not that secure online
And I also have 13 accounts using a weak password just passwords that are easy to guess.
So another website that I've found is
haveibeenpwed.com
So what it does is it analyze hundreds of databases containing
information about billions of leaked accounts.
I'm gonna check if I have been pwned right now.
What you have to do is enter
your email address and just click pwned
So I have been owned on 13 breach sites.
Oh this is so interesting so it tells me
where my information was leaked and when so
for example Bitly it says in may 2014 the link management company
Bitly announced that they suffered a data breach
so the compromised data was email addresses, passwords and usernames.
So it is possible that I use the same password and username combination from
Bitly and then it got breached and later on that's why some of my other accounts
are now considered as at risk.
And you can also put in your email
address so in the future if your email address comes up in any future breaches
they just email you to notify you.
You have been pwned!
We can't escape the fact that these security breaches can happen.
And as long as we continue to use apps, we run the risk.
So what I want to know is how can we be safer smarter users?
I've got David Alfred who's the co-head for the data protection privacy and
cyber security practice at law firm Drew & Napier.
He's also the program
director of their data protection and cyber security academy.
My first question and I guess everyone's pressing question will be what steps can
I take to be safer online?
Before you give up your data, I think it's quite
important to understand what is it for and if for any
reason you think you know it's a bit unusual they're asking certain types of
information then don't provide it.
In terms of checking, most websites will
have a privacy policy and sometimes more
information more details about what they want your personal data
for and what they're going to use it for.
Am I being a very unsafe internet user
if I just click accept every time they say
you see those long terms and conditions before entering a website or even you
know signing up for something and you know I
just click accept. Am I being really unsafe?
Well the lawyer in me would probably say that you are being unsafe.
But of course that's not true if we really had to read
every single word of all these policies which we encounter I think we'll spend a
lot of time reading legal jargon and you know not
having enough time to do what we want to do.
So most of the time
you know these policies are there for your information and what I mentioned
earlier is when you need to find out more that's when you really should be
looking for it.
So it's really when you're interacting
with the website and you find you know yourself a bit uncomfortable
with the amount of personal data or the types of information they've requested
that's when you may want to go and check or rather you should check what exactly
do they need it for
and why are they asking for it.
And if you think that you know you don't really want to give
them that information then don't do that.
So that's far more important than
reading through the details of every single privacy policy.
So I think nowadays a lot of usage online is through apps on your
mobile phone so how do I decide before downloading an app if an app is safe?
So I think it's quite important to know what the app does with your personal data.
Look at the information provided by the app developer.
I think now for a number of app stores
you can actually find a summary of that information...
On the app store itself. That's right before you download if not
you might have to go to the web developers
website and see what information they provide.
So the classic example would be if you had a calculator app and for some reason it's
tracking your location and you know your IP address and so on
and why would a calculator need to do that right?
What about password practices?
Professional recommendation would always be to have a
completely unique and completely random
password of you know a certain length
eight is
perhaps the minimum is quite short but good to have 10 or 12
and those are passwords nobody can remember right.
So what you can do
to achieve something like uh you know a random looking password
is actually to come up with a phrase and which you can remember it's an easy to
remember kind of phrase and then think of how I can translate
that into a password for example take the first letter of each word in
the phrase and use that as your password.
I'll probably suggest throw in one or two special characters
those are the characters on typically on a computer it's the number row
and the characters above the numbers and yeah you're good to go you have a good
random like password which you can probably remember.
Good! Then I can use
this password for everything.
Ah well you could use you can use this
password. I would say don't use one password
for everything. Because you never know if one password
does get compromised somehow you don't want to have all your
accounts exposed at the same time.
So do have a few passwords.
Think of a few
phrases and you know you're good to go.
So how do I
remember all of those phrases and all of those passwords
all of those websites should I use a password manager?
Password managers are
good to use especially when you have lots of you
know passwords to remember.
It's better than just creating a single
password and trying to use it across all your accounts.
You should have separate passwords.
Perhaps as a last tip going online
is just like going out crossing the road right you have to use your common sense
you have to look left and right keep yourself safe
You wouldn't shout your personal data out from you know
on the road and similarly you wouldn't want to be doing that when you're online
It's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle so to speak.
So now that I've
gotten some tips from David, I'm going to try and put them into practice.
First up I'm obviously not very good at passwords so I'm going to use this tip
to create a better password.
So I found this site called howsecuremypassword.net
and what it does is you can enter a
password and it will tell you how long it would take for a computer to crack
your password.
So for example if you use the word
password as your password let's see how easily your password will
be cracked.
Your password will be cracked instantly.
How about if you use p
a s s word with the @ sign as a A?
It will take a computer three minutes to
crack your password.
So going with David's tip. I'm gonna create
a better password using the first letter of every word in the phrase and some
numbers So I really can't stand that stupid
alvin and the chipmunks movie
that came out over 10 years ago
It would take a computer about 200 billion years to crack my password
Huh! I feel like that was fantastic.
Okay so even though I have a fantastic
password now they do have more tips so top tip here is use a password manager
so that's the same huh actually i think that this website
is sponsored by a password manager app because it says to download this
specific app for your password manager and there are
these ads over the site for the same app so maybe that's where the website is from.
Second it says character variety there are no symbols in my password
and it only contains numbers and letters so adding a symbol can make my password
more secure and you can often use spaces in passwords.
So again that is aligned with the tips that
David gave me.
And the length is long. So my password is over 16 characters long
and it just reminds me never forget your long secure password by using a password manager.
This website is definitely sponsored by
the password manager app.
So something else that David said was to find out
more about any app before you download it and to check out what permissions it
wants from you.
So I was scrolling through the app store
and I found something that I thought was a little bit suspicious so here's a
simple calculator app but when you go into the kind of
permissions it wants from you about this app all the way down app info
app permissions it requests access to my camera and my
microphone.
I have no idea why a calculator app will
need permissions to access my camera and microphone
so I looked at the screenshot of the app and okay fine there is a function called
camera currency converter so maybe that's why they need my camera but
they say that it's an experimental feature and they still don't explain why
they might need access to my microphone
Anyway, if you don't feel comfortable
with it just don't download it. There are ton of apps out there anyway.
So we've come to the end of the episode and filming this episode was actually
very reassuring for me because the steps that you can take to
become safer online are small and uncomplicated but
they can make a big difference.
So I hope you found today's episode useful.
Once again don't forget to like subscribe and hit the little bell so you
get notified every time a new episode comes out
I'll see you guys next time. Bye!