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| How much does your loss of privacy cost you today? |
We all value our privacy. You want to be alone with your thoughts. But you also want to know you can go to sleep at night without some random stranger banging on your door because they tracked you down. And some people are afraid the government will send workers to harass them.
I'm not worried about government harassment but maybe that just means I'm lucky. And the government has been keeping records on people since long before there were computers. Computers make government knowledge of our lives more pervasive but I would rather know the government can track would-be terrorists than that it has blinded itself to their whereabouts out of a misplaced concern over privacy.
Today's threat to privacy comes from the private sector, not from government. As flawed as they are our governments in the free world are ruled by laws. Private companies act as though they don't need to answer to anyone. I know the European Union is trying to change all that. Ever since the GDPR went into effect, Europe has been calling American companies to account for their disrespect for our privacy.
Internet privacy goes beyond what companies willingly share and fail to protect. It also includes what we ourselves share openly or accidentally. Do you know what is common to these email addresses?
kyong.bredimus@yahoo.com
johnsmith@yahoo.com
david@yahoo.com
They are all mentioned by one or more Websites. That means you can find them in search engines. So I can find kyong.bredimus@yahoo.com on MyLife, johnsmith@yahoo.com on Twitter, and david@yahoo.com on Twitter. These are just a few examples.
Several years back I replaced my old email address when I discovered it was all over the Internet. I never thought about how easy it would be for someone to track me down. And by tracking me down they can try to steal my identity. Worse, they could hack into my private financial accounts and steal my money.
Every time you give both a bank and some app your email address you're creating a footprint that a hacker might be able to follow. If the hackers can find your email address they can try to use it to break into any account where you set up credit card or debit card information.
Internet privacy issues go well beyond Facebook's amateurish attempts to sell advertising data. People have been harmed, robbed, and kidnapped because criminals found them on the Internet. And government employees have been hacked and tracked because criminals and enemy forces where able to find where they lived. In Iraq, when the Islamic State seized cities in 2014, they used captured government data files to trace government workers and their families. But they were also using social media to find people. And U.S. military personnel are now told not to leave their cell phones active when they are moving around because they can be tracked.
Soon we'll live with the Internet of Cars. Millions of vehicles already have remote safety services like OnStar. Our cars will one day communicate with each other, with the road systems, and they will bleed information about who we are and where we are.
Our private world is shrinking day by day. Every new app we install, every new technology we adapt in our lives, every new service we sign up for chisels away at our privacy. And that loss of privacy gives hackers one more chance to find our personal financial information and use it for their own benefit.
For this reason I use a "throwaway" email address for every new account I sign up for. If I don't log into each account with the same email address, then if one service is hacked I don't have to worry about another service being hacked. If one email address is leaked to the Internet the others are still protected.
