The Internet is a creative, user-endorsed environment supporting information exchanges for every purpose known to man. So what is it about Internet use that could be so self-defeating when it comes to consumer privacy?
There are a few best-laid deceptions in the marketplace keeping the Internet hostile to personal privacy.
“The Internet is free."
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how the Internet can be a multi-billion dollar business and be free to use by so many? The truth is that the Internet is not ‘free’. Nothing in life is free. There are costs.
How the Internet pays for free-to-you services, starts with online beacons; which track, trace and evaluate your traffic and identity. This is usually your home or work IP address via your Internet Service Provider. After awhile you leave a distinct ‘footprint’ online. Then many marketing algorithms compare among each other. This all takes place hundreds or thousands of miles away from most online consumers at server farms and data brokerage firms. The data firms keep tabs on any information you volunteer to the “free” service: age, sexual preferences, when you have free time, if you’re working at work or unemployed, what kind of car you drive, so forth and so on.
Then the firms sell it to whomever is buying. That is how the Internet pays each other millions to stay in business while you use a “free” account. You are the product they are selling.
“My personal information is protected by US law.”
Test this unfortunate half-truth. If the government can hack you and never suffer consequence or a corporation can help themselves to your contacts, with no consequences over a period of years, are you being protected by the law?
There are a wide variety of laws, but no holistic federal law to protect all consumer data and personal information. Protected areas of consumer privacy are scattered through a variety of policy areas: health, employment, driver protections, data breach notification. Protections also vary from State-to-State in the US, but again, no holistic area of coverage. There’s just a sense of policy running scared from your serial outrage in the Capitols of our country.
Some countries and continents have a national consumer data protection policy or law. In the US, it varies from agency to agency. So privacy protection according to US nation State and member States remains as spotty as a Jackson Pollack painting.
The best fix for this problem is a fearless examination of State & Federal privacy laws to cover the areas you are most concerned about. You can do a casual search online or visit your local law library. The more informed you are, the better decisions you will make when it comes to who you trust with your information.
“I am owed whatever I can get from the Internet.”
Nothing sets you up for failed privacy results more than presuming that someone else’s server farm, computing code and the staff hired to market and manage your transactional information are beholden to you. If the Internet architects can fool you into believing the space you rented on the currency of your data is actually yours, you are deceived.
This illusion is typically dispelled by being booted off or banned by an online moderator. Some have attempted campaigns to collect on online company space because they are avid users. They are likely presented with a document created by a very well paid army of lawyers telling them how the information they fed into their system actually belongs to the company because of an End License User Agreement. That would be the biggest deception of all.
The only thing you own in the cloud is your information and your data. That never changes. If you want to change the balance of user power, you have to stop feeding the beast the data it needs to thrive.
“I erased my data.”
There’s a saying in the privacy field that ‘data never dies’. It is somewhat true. Forensics teams use the same tactics corporate data recovery pros use, say, after a storm surge knocks out computer networks. That’s great news if involuntary data loss would ruin your business or create financial havoc. However, if you wanted to scrub personal information from the online universe you will need to visit a different kind of reputation specialist, like Privacy Duck.
These service specialists address unique data brokerage and reputation conferencing strata called, People Finders, who license personally identifiable information. People Finders sell your address, location, work, age and contact information to anyone for any price. An even less legitimate version of this takes place on the dark web to online criminals.
THE BOTTOM LINE
If you want to better protect your personal information, adopt a consumer privacy regimen for your household. You are always the best gate-keeper of what goes in and what comes out of every information portal of your life. Digital privacy is a new consumer discipline. However, it is having increasingly great & powerful results coaching the market to regard your privacy.
You can be the next person in line to demand anonymized data ecosystems like PDDP, HTTPS, increasingly secured communication, encryption, and ad blockers. If you already use services like Ghostery, Mozilla private browsing services and anonymizing search engines like, Duck Duck Go, you are on the path to reorganizing an online currency system.
Online businesses continue to put your privacy on the sacrifice altar when they don't have to. Your part of the business end of your agreement needs to require privacy by design, warrants for your data, and to anonymize data they use in marketing exchanges.
Demand better protections. They are technically within reach.