As rightly stated by Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, we should all come to terms with the fact that privacy is dead. If not dead, then at least on life support, in a digital age where our lives have become so open that we are even tracked by the devices that we carry and the anti-theft car monitors that are supposed to keep us safe, not to mention the widespread invasion that social media and online hackers have made into our daily lives. Let us explore how our privacy is threatened from different dimensions.
The grey nexus of social networking
So far as social networks are concerned, information about a user can be gathered through sharing by the user or through electronic tracking. Usually information that a user himself or herself shares includes items such as gender; biographical information like hometown, education and employment; geographical location; contacts; and status updates. These details may be made public by default or by the user choosing to post the information in the public domain. Your information might also become public through a change in the social networking site’s privacy policy or via reposting and copying by approved contacts. Social networks can help you get a job and also go as far as firing you from your existing job!
Electronic tracking involves the use of cookies that can track the movement of a user from website to website, tracking the sites that have been viewed. Cookies even have the potential to store information like the number of items you put in your shopping cart when you are using an ecommerce site.
Cell phones and anti-theft monitors
In regard to cell phones, especially Smartphones, we can indulge in a plethora of activities like talking, texting, accessing the internet, managing bank accounts, making purchases and what not! Remember that your service provider can collect a lot of information through your Smartphone including your location, outgoing and incoming calls and more. In addition to this, stuff like financial data and passwords stored in your Smartphone may leave immense scope for cyber criminals to collect personal data, steal money, harass or commit identity theft.
Even your car’s anti-theft monitor is powerful enough to invade your privacy. OnStar tracking, which can help locate a stolen vehicle and send diagnostics to repair shops and car manufacturers through real-time wireless communication, is again a potential breach on privacy because consumer speed, location and other information collected may be abused.
The ‘good’ old friends called hackers
They are everywhere, spread across the nooks and corners of the online territory, and are always ready to exploit every weakness of your device’s or online account’s security system to hijack the same. Cyber attacks evade privacy and can have malicious effects at both individual and global levels. Once hacked, the system becomes a storehouse for potential access and misuse of any information.
Hackers, trackers and social media – these are not all. Our privacy is threatened every moment by government monitoring of almost all internet communication providers, from Smartphones to social networking sites. The striking thing about this is that most of the time even technology providers themselves are unaware of the same. Given all these, it’s time to reframe the definition of privacy and rethink whether safety and privacy really come hand in hand!