Does Privacy Exists and Do We Care?

I believe a fundamental component to freedom is a right to privacy, but I am not sure privacy exists in 2018. In fact, I assume it doesn’t. I assume every email and text I write and every phone call I make could be seen or heard. What I haven’t really thought about before now is the data organizations are collecting about me and if that is an invasion of my privacy.

When I bought my fitbit I wanted to compete with my sister on the number of steps we take each day. I didn’t think about how this device tracks my every move and personal information such a weight, and age was collected when I created my profile. When I bought my iPhone it was just a practical tool to make my job easier and keep me connected to all the things we “need” in our fast pace world. I never thought about how apple has access to some of my most personal information such as my credit card number.

I don’t think I would make different choices about buying my fitbit or iPhone knowing what I know now, but it definitely makes me think differently about steps I should be taking to protect my privacy and cyber security. Should I fill out every optional detail of my profile? What do I store in my cloud and how often do I change my apple password? How many times have I used my email to sign into a random website without understanding how they are using that information.

My concern around privacy now is do I trust the organizations to protect my information. And I don’t know. I don’t know what they are doing with it and finding out is difficult and do I trust what they say? This isn’t government where I can FOIA their emails to see what they are actually saying. I have to trust what they say is their word without any transparency. (Companies do have long legal language on their websites but who reads that? We probably should…) I do know that it is in a companies best financial interest to protect my information. This gives me a lot of comfort because I do think many private organizations invest in people and resources to keep their members information safe. If they had a privacy breach the financial costs could be devastating. But what happens when the people who are in control of our information become bad actors? We might trust a company today, but if they get new leadership that changes policies I don’t like, it’s not like I can just get my information back. It’s already out there.

We definitely have a choice about the information we put out there and the products we use, but in 2018 if you want to be relevant it’s not practical to avoid all these modern conveniences. I also have seen some of the benefits about having more information on people. For example the targeting that campaigns are able to do now because we know much more about voters is leading to higher turnout and more civic engagement because campaigns can reach people previously unreachable. This is a good thing, but there has to be a balance and we have to trust the people who have this information to use it for good and not bad. This a scary thing because we don’t know who our future leaders will be. (at the rate we are goin in the US, I’m not sure I trust some of our leaders with this information)

I think it’s too late for me and many of my generation our information is out there, but talking about privacy, learning about the tools to protect ourselves is critical to future generations. Maybe we don’t care. Maybe we like that amazon is suggesting products to us that we like and we feel like there’s nothing we can really do so why stress about it? I sometimes feel this way and have heard many of my peers say the same thing. But we have to care, we have to be informed and we have to do our best to hold leaders in the private and public sectors accountable to keeping our information safe.

Related posts:

Here is the quick guide to setup Windows and Linux in two different SDD. Disable legacy boot in BIOS. Make sure your boot mode is set to UEFI. Install Windows on HDD/ SDD 1 ( /dev/sda ). Windows will…

Monitoring is key for troubleshooting, here is how I built a custom AWS Cloudwatch metrics to monitor and tune HTTP connection in nodeJS and express

I assume that you are a new reader and I also assume that you do not know anything about me and my story. That is perfectly fine because you may find yourself in my story and my words that will…