The Great Privacy Debate

It seems you cannot go anywhere on the internet these days without someone arguing about the privacy concerns of this website, or that technology, but to the average everyday person, what does all of this really mean? Consider this, millennials are going to be the first generation where your birth and government records, your school records, your health records, and your “likes” are all electronic, and in many cases easily accessible. The fact that this information is out there may not be an issue alone, but when large companies aggregate that information to create a dossier on you, and then target adds to the person they think you are, it can be a little creepy. In 2012 Target was able to predict and determine that a girl was pregnant, even before her father did. Target had (based on its prediction the girl was pregnant) sent coupons to the girl that matched products she would need at that stage of her pregnancy. All of that was based purely on purchasing habits over a few months of one credit card.

Now at the same time no one is advocating for using only cash at the grocery store, deleting your Facebook right now, or closing your Gmail because Google scans it, because those services are useful. I literally wouldn't be able to do any work if I didn't have a Facebook account. Perhaps though a middle ground can be reached, one where we don’t volunteer every bit of our interests to the world for examination, but we also don’t live as shut-ins wearing tin-foil hats. Below I have compiled some of the easiest ways to reduce some of the data available about you on the internet. Next week is going to be an outline of the legal rights you have regarding your data (spoiler: it’s not a lot).

Facebook

Large data aggregation companies mine Facebook, twitter, and any other social media sites to get more information about what you like (advertisers) and your habits/history (Background checks). One of the easiest ways that you can prevent your information from getting out there is to change your posting from the default friends of friends to friends. For example if you post a picture of you and your friends drinking, that gets shared with your 2,000 or so friends, and if it’s also shared with friends of friends, suddenly 4,000,000 people have access to the photo. Facebook actually has a handy little tool that allows you to change all of your previous posts to friends or private if you want to hide all of your old stuff, but keep in mind this won’t affect a third party that already has your information. You can also in the privacy settings make it so that your profile is not searchable on the internet (so getting to it from google for example), but anyone with a Facebook account will still be able to search it in Facebook’s search engine. Finally, make sure to manage things you are tagged in carefully, if you are tagged in a friend’s photo, you have no control over who its shared with, only your friend does.

Google Products

Gmail: There is nothing you can do except change add settings in your general Google profile. This is done by going to settings in your Google profile, then privacy/adds, and selecting the opt out option for everything.

Google Chrome: Although your protections on paper (in the contract you accept when installing) are very limited, Google does offer some helpful extensions to reduce the ability of sites to collect data on you as you are browsing. The first is the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on, and the second is Keep My Opt-Outs, both are by google, and both help to stop advertising cookies from landing on your computer. Of course if you really want to eliminate the ability for cookies to land on your machine at all you can do so manually in the settings of Chrome, although the result is a browser that is almost non-functional.
Google+: Essentially any information you put in your about profile for Google+ is automatically public, period. So, only put up what you would feel comfortable everyone knowing about you.

If you live in Europe you have the ability to request google take down certain search results. How that process works is rather unclear as it requires you to (Currently as of 9/18/2014) submit a legal action, but that process may become more straightforward with time.

I accept the terms and conditions

In theory of course you should be always reading the terms and conditions before you click accept because clicking that button is the same as signing your legal signature, but in reality no one does that. Instead most of us just hit the button and then go back to what we were doing. Now to be fair most of us don’t have the time to read the 100+ pages of legal documentation that come with the iphone, so instead one of the best ways to know if there is an issue is to google/bing/duckduckgo it. Chances are that even if you haven’t read the contract, someone else has, and they will have posted on the internet what you are signing away (if its anything important to them). Of course if you do have the time, read the privacy section because that’s the most important part, everything else is usually just common sense.