Why I Care About Privacy

Ever been chatting with someone about a topic, say dogs, and then suddenly your ads are full of dog snacks? Creepy.

It happens to me too. Recently I was talking about planning a trip to either Japan or China. Next time I opened social media, guess what showed up? Places to visit, food spots, and tourist hotspots in Japan and China.

Today I want to go through why I care about privacy, and hopefully talk you into caring about it a bit more.

They’re selling your data, and you’re not seeing a cent of it

Companies take your data and sell it to data brokers for profit. Meanwhile you get asked to subscribe for the “better” features. If anyone is going to sell my data, I would rather it be me, and I would like the profit.

It’s tied to your security

Privacy isn’t the same thing as security, but the two are related. The less data you put out there, the smaller the attack surface someone has to work with.

Every email address or phone number floating around is another contact point for phishing. Every home address is a possible target for a break-in. Details about when you are away and what valuables you own? That is genuinely useful to the wrong person.

You might be sure you are not a target. But can you promise that stays true? The data you share sticks around for years. Is the chance of it being used against you really zero, forever?

When I was younger, a schoolmate posted a lot online: what she ate, where she was, all of it. A lot of those photos were near her home. Eventually a group of people pieced together her address from the photos and turned up to harass her at her house. I never heard how it ended, but I hope she was okay.

The point is that privacy and security overlap. Looking after your privacy improves your security too.

Can you actually trust them with your data?

Can you trust the people inside these organizations with your data?

Eric Murphy has a video on why he cares about privacy, with real case studies on what happens when you don’t. Some involve employees spying on customers. On the more extreme end, some involve people being falsely charged with crimes.

Those extreme cases are the ones that should worry you. Sure, it might never happen to you, but “might never” is not the same as “can’t”. When someone with power in the legal system decides you are guilty, they will dig through everything you have ever done and find something to twist. The EFF covered the case of Ola Bini, a security researcher falsely accused of hacking into a system. He did clear his name in the end. But the police had his phone, and they took one of his security research projects and used it as evidence to charge him with attempted unauthorized access.

I would recommend watching Eric Murphy’s video on why you should care about privacy.

How to get started

Take a look at Privacy Guides, an opinionated wiki and forum covering privacy topics. Awesome Privacy is another good list of privacy-friendly software and services.

If I had to leave you with one pointer: keep threat modelling in mind. Privacy isn’t about hiding everything. It is about choosing what to hide, and who to hide it from.