The recent news that as many as 50 million Facebook users not only had their personal data exposed to an outside company called Cambridge Analytica, but that that information might have been used to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, has sent a lot of people scrambling for the delete key to get rid of their Facebook account.
The thinking seems to be “This data breach involved Facebook, so if I shut down my account, I’ll be safe. Phew, dodged a bullet there!” Which is all very well, as far as it goes; as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough (to paraphrase Charles Dickens).
Why? Because if you are a person who lives in the western world in the 21st century—as I assume most readers of The Journal are—then Facebook is far from the only entity that is, or might be, collecting information about you and keeping it on file (where it is vulnerable to data breaches), or mining that data to find out more about you, or selling that data to other companies so they can do the same. Have you ever wondered why, within days of Googling a certain product, ads for said product begin popping up on your computer?
As reported elsewhere in this week’s paper, it is mind-boggling how much information about you is out there. Journalist Dylan Curran wrote in The Guardian that when he asked to see the file of information Google had collected about him, the result added up to three million Word documents’ worth, including his entire YouTube history, all the apps he uses, all the pages he’s shared, what products he’s bought and from what companies, every email he’s ever sent, all the photos he’s taken with his phone, every Google search he’s ever done, and much, much more (summary: clearing your browser history isn’t quite the failsafe way of protecting yourself you probably think it is).
By now you might be thinking that deleting Facebook is only the first step. But wait! Do you have Google Home, or a similar voice-activated, artificially intelligent assistant such as Amazon Echo in your home? The odds are good that you do: the Alexa app, needed to run Amazon Echo, was the most downloaded app in the Apple Store on Christmas Day 2017. Google, for example, assures customers that it only records what you say for a few seconds after you say the key word that activates the device. Is this true? Quite possibly. But what about all the data you’re feeding into it?
You might be starting to think about severing all electronic ties. First, good luck with that. Second, that personal information floating around about you doesn’t disappear the minute you get rid of Facebook or Twitter, or stop using Google, or give up your smartphone for a landline. And third, old-fashioned paper documents are just as vulnerable to theft or hacking, as demonstrated this week when Interior Health revealed that a binder full of confidential patient information vanished in early March and has still not been located.
We invited all this technology into our homes and lives, and trying to bar the door now is useless. The best advice is to check your privacy settings, be mindful of your online footprint, and think twice about those online quizzes. In other words: be careful out there.
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