I admit I have bad digital habits. I post too often on FB and Instagram, rant on Twitter and I do check mobile like zillion times per day. I won’t say all this is fine but I can rationalize that it fulfills some of my basic social needs.
But in recent year or so I managed somehow to limit some of these activities and what’s more important (for me), I started to think and act to protect my privacy. Or better to say, filter what and how it is delivered to data hungry services.
(Are you also annoyed with binding address analytics.twitter.com when you click on a link?)
So what I did in recent year or so was:
- I learned (and acted) about browser fingerprinting and how to (try) protect myself.
- Sandboxed and use various browsers for different services (one for browsing, one for FB, Google and so on).
- Started using strict cookie policy (deleting, rejecting…).
- De-Googled: I stopped using Google and related services as much as possible (duckgogo, no Keep, Maps, Docs anymore…).
- Replaced my broken Android with iPhone (and related services) and I am all Mac. (One would say one devil for the other, but I can’t sacrifice my business).
- Strict App control in iPhone/iPad (location services, access…).
- I am not logged into services even if I use them (stores, bookings…).
- Using different mail accounts for different services (especially on mobile).
- I don’t use FB Messenger and I only access FB on mobile via Opera Mini (that is used for FB only).
- Some other stuff I can’t remember.
Call me paranoid, but I it made me feel comfortable ;). I understand the “data company” business model, but it just became as a huge vacuum cleaner that sucks all the data.
FB and Instagram bad habit remained, tho I managed to control it more. I don’t Like Pages out of my close interest, don’t click on the articles (FB is not my primary article source) etc.
Anyway, all this was pretty simple to do. It demands a bit of discipline and getting out of the comfort zone, but nothing a lazy person can’t handle.
So the expected result should (ideally) look like:
- Google or FB (and others) can’t detect where I am surfing.
- I don’t provide them with the various data if I don’t want to.
- I can spoof Google Analytics and others (to some extent; browser fingerprinting is heavy stuff).
- Android is not sending tons of data to Google via Play services.
- All these services know about me exactly what I provide to them in one browser during single session (not cross browser detection of my identity).
But let me share few things that happened to me in the last two months or so:
- With my teammates, we discussed a product on a closed Slack channel. I didn’t search it on Google, neither checked their web site. But in few minutes the bloody service appeared on my FB stream as promotion.
- I was checking Instagram on a train, with a location service unaccessible for IG. A (pretty) girl was sitting next to me and she appeared as suggested contact a few hours later. Pretty cool and scary at the same time.
- I booked a bus ride on one browser with only session cookies on andjust after that the ad on FB for exactly this destination/company appeared on my other browser (sandboxed for FB).
- Got a promo mail on my pro mail account that is unrelated with a mail I use for FB login… and bam, you guessed, here comes ad on FB for the product shortly after that.
I can understand that vacuum data sucking strategy and data companies are doing many things to get relevant data. But the extent of their capabilities how to get all the meta data and my inability to protect myself really annoys me.
I am in Internet of Things business and you don’t have to be rocket scientist to figure out IoT is ticking privacy bomb.
I mean, the article about a guy who is afraid of his smart Samsung TV is kinda fun, but the case when Google Echo or Amazon Alexa (forgot which one) called the police automatically while people were arguing is a good warning.
In a way it’s easier for my biz at the moment, because we are in the Industrial IoT where data privacy is still a standard and that and our service protects privacy and security by default.
I plan to write my next article about IoT security, so stay tuned.
Well, I made my soul lighter by posting the issue online with another privacy sacrifice.
Written and too lazy to edit by Jernej Adamic