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| --- This message came from the IEEE 802.11 Chairs' Advisory Committee Reflector ---
A recent view on how do I protect my online privacy -------- Forwarded Message --------
How do I protect my online privacy from 'surveillance capitalism'? Chris wants to better protect his privacy. What can he easily do besides de-Googling his online life By Jack Schofield, Dec 5 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/askjack/2019/dec/05/how-do-i-protect-my-online-privacy-from-surveillance-capitalism> Having read Edward Snowden’s revelations in the Guardian and in his book, I would like to protect myself from both the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism. I already use a VPN, and I am in the process of removing Google from my online life. What else should I be doing that’s reasonable for a home environment? Chris Great timing! On Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a 17,000-word report on this topic. Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance, by Bennett Cyphers and Gennie Gebhart, covers both online privacy problems and the growth of real-word surveillance. BOWM, for short, explains how personal data is gathered, brokered, and used to serve targeted advertisements. In theory, users should prefer useful adverts to irrelevant ones. In reality, it provides a stream of data to anyone who wants it. Most of us, I suspect, don’t object to the ads as much as to the vast infrastructure used to deliver them. Non-targeted ads are fine with me. As the report points out, when you visit a website, data associated with your online identity will be sent to anyone interested in bidding in an auction to show you a targeted advertisement. A data-snorting company can just make low bids to ensure it never wins while pocketing your data for nothing. This is a flaw in the implied deal where you trade data for benefits. You can limit what you give away by blocking tracking cookies. Unfortunately, you can still be tracked by other techniques. These include web beacons, browser fingerprinting and behavioural data such as mouse movements, pauses and clicks, or sweeps and taps. Data brokers can try to connect whatever information they get to data that you are giving away in other areas. This might include your email address, mobile phone number, location, credit card and store card numbers, your car’s number plate and face recognition data. Some of this information may have been purchased from third parties. You probably handed over your email address to get coffee-shop wifi or to register on various websites. You probably gave some social media sites and app-based services your phone number. You used your credit card to buy things online, and provided your home address for deliveries. Your smartphone is constantly giving away your location. Even if you turn off location tracking, your phone can be found by triangulating from cellular masts or by companies that have beacons listening for potential wireless or Bluetooth connections. Even if you could avoid all the real-world trackers, you probably have smartphone apps that have access to all sorts of personal data and keep “phoning home”. Some of these apps may know how many steps you have taken, your heart rate, and how you slept, among other things. As BOWM points out, real-world identifiers can last a lot longer than your browsers or even your devices. Your main email address, phone number, credit card number and car number plate don’t change very often. Good luck changing, or disguising, your fingerprint and face recognition data. “Gait recognition” is already being used in China. You can run but you can’t hide. Today, we are past the stage where it’s a technology problem. Only governments can protect our privacy by banning the collection of data and giving us the rights both to prevent its collection without explicit permission, and to delete data that has already been collected. The EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was a baby step in the right direction. BOWM also mentions Vermont’s data privacy law, the Illinois Biometric Information Protection Act (BIPA) and next year’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We need many more things like this, but I don’t expect we’ll get them in the UK – especially not if we’re outside the EU. In any case, the game looks like moving on from browser-based surveillance to exploiting data from smartphones, smart watches and “Internet of Things” devices, with smart cars and smart roads to come. And rather than just flogging you stuff, the new threats include manipulating behaviour, as Shoshana Zuboff discusses at length in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. [snip] Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp To unsubscribe from the STDS-802-11-CAC list, click the following link: https://listserv.ieee.org/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=STDS-802-11-CAC&A=1 |