The way we were, can we ever get our privacy back?

[thinkingishard]

Let’s go back in time to the advent of modern digital data collection.

When mass digital data collection started to take off in the 90’s most of the data was anonymized, the data was used to help identify trends or potential issues to guide science or government or society. Present day we are data hoarders. We collect everything because you never know what meta data might be important to merge with some other meta data to paint a picture that at the time is relevant and beneficial to our current stance on X issue. Big data really means big profit, everyone is bought and sold as a product and we consent to it in the form of “free” apps and programs that make our lives more convenient. The difference today vs 25 years ago is that today the digital exhaust you create is connected direct back to you and everyone can know it’s you for a small fee.

@wwf talks about how we as a society have enslaved ourselves in part due to our dependence on social media, government assistance, and general media consumption in his post “Clearing up the confusion behind slavery”. What I took away from this is that we all must free ourselves as a first step in freeing others.

• Can you delete facebook?
• Can you get off twitter?
• What about using google, can you stop?

We all have a digital tracker in our pockets that lets big data know exactly what you are doing, thinking, and looking for at any moment of the day. Do you use privacy focused web browsers (firefox), turn off scrypts/cookies, use privacy search engines (duckduckgo), or do you prefer facebook to hold your login keys to every site you visit online? People today choose convenience because it’s nice to not have to remember passwords and most don’t know any better. Being privacy focused takes a little more work (time) and can inconvenience you and others around you.

There can be only two! (sorry I couldn’t work in a solid Highlander pun here)

It all starts and ends with you…

On a personal level, mitigating the risk associated with the data that is out there about everything (and more importantly the meta data) falls on everyone. As an individual you can choose how you communicate, how and what info you give to a company, is what you are getting from that company worth the digital footprints you will leave? Someone is going to follow those footprints to get in front of you so they can profit. Yes, sometimes having strong passwords, sudo email accounts, and refusing services that ask too much info is hard but controlling the product that is you takes time and effort to protect and cultivate, don’t just give it way for a couple cute cat memes.

If you use duckduckgo.com to search, you give up the years and years of data SEO algorithms that google has, what that means is, the answer you are looking for might be on page two instead of page one of your search results. Is that worth giving away so much of you?

I am not suggesting we go back to the dark ages and communicate via pigeons

To move our society forward we need to elevate our understandings and education to a higher level (we need a lot more than that but ill keep it short). Innovation can help do that, innovation needs data, it doesn’t need to know that it was ME that contributed XYZ data. There can be a level of security and privacy in todays world, that is if we trust the companies/people/governments that are collecting the data to not capture who specifically was contributing the data (sometimes as a submitter you have a choice). We also need to trust these companies to not leak or breach our data, if they don’t know who contributed the data, then a breach is much less harmful (I know some data needs personal info, but that’s less privacy and more security).

Right now, we cannot trust that any company/government/website has our personal best interest in mind, because they don’t. We mean more to the powerful as a cash crop than we do as human beings. Every time you give your data away for “free”, you are sinking yourself further into debt/slavery/perpetuity.

There is no simple solution to this issue with the technology that we have today because it all rests on trust. Blockchain technology can solidify trust and bring back anonymized data collection/access, but it still has risks and a lot of growing up to do, that’s probably a whole different discussion. The point is, that this all begins with you, you have the power to start taking your life back now, take your data back now, talk to your friends and family help educate right now. Yeah you might come off as a tin foil hat wearing crazy (for now) but this is becoming more and more mainstream every day.

Side note, … this pissed me off last night (at the big game) … put your damn phones down and enjoy the once in a lifetime show … holy crap people do you need that video to prove your worth or something?