It’s been long since I wrote my last article. And now, I’m back with a bang! For People, who think the blog topic is still an age-old dystopian statement, I’m sure that my article is vetted to thoroughly purge your misconceptions in this realm. With no more boring prologue, let me just jump into my blog FAQ.
What privacy really is?
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves, or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. In short, Privacy is not simply an absence of information about us in the minds of others; rather it is the control we have over information about ourselves. No wonder, that privacy of an individual should be valued on par with the fundamental right to freedom in a democracy. But, what does the current state look like? And where are we heading to? are the questions to be answered 🙂
What really happened to privacy?
It’s simple. Privacy is no longer a right to an individual! It is as sharp and simple as this. Sounds like some conspiracy topic getting in, but the truth seems to be alike with conspiracy when trust still enjoys it’s upper hand when it is really broken. We speak more to mail-boxes, chats, social networks and virtual personal assistants than to any friends/family members. Clearly, we live in an half-augmented cyborg world, where our character/traits are no longer only known to a circle in near proximity. Forget about Gene Editing/Reordering, it is very much possible with today’s data rolling around within the Big Brothers of the Internet, that we could literally create virtual identical humans out of the dust, just by the massive information that we have. With no more metaphors and turnarounds, here I present you 3 exciting (for the known)/alarming(for the unknown) data-points to prove my clause.
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Eric Schmidt, long-time CEO of Google once said this golden truth-revealing statement “If you’re doing something that you don’t want other people to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”And this does not require to prove that Google is actually stealing our data. We all know it by heart, that Google really does its job very well enough! But the statement still has it’s the hazardous aspect to be highlighted. Seems like a threat than a statement, that urges us to cross-verify each of our actions, before we actually present it to the world. Google knows your emails, searches, location, friends, credentials and what more! It can clearly write a Wikipedia article about you and keep it updated everytime your details change.
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As an Indian, it is very much essential for me to speak about another alarming issue that has happened with Aadhar. Aadhaar is mass surveillance technology. Unlike, targeted surveillance which is a good thing, and essential for national security and public order — mass surveillance undermines security. First of all, the design of Aadhar is nearing it’s unfortunate cremation and the system is not really scaled to meet the humongous needs. Recently a tweet from a French hacker has clearly shown that the Android APK of Aadhar is storing passwords/debug-logs in clear-text, visible after any naive reverse-engineering techniques. Aadhar was initially introduced as an authentication platform, but owing to various integrations with third-parties like TeleCommunications/Gas/Electricity and other basic amenities, we could clearly see an alarming situation here. Tomorrow, if there is a crazy government taking over, it could clearly cut an individual from all basic services, by just deactivating his Aadhar. Now, it seems to be scary! There are lot more hazards from the original design of Aadhar, that is circulating the web vigorously. You will get to know some quick-links at the end of the post. Meanwhile, continue your reading 🙂
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Is Government really spying us? – This is a question for decades, that we still don’t know answers yet. And according to the research that I have done in this topic, I would say an “YES” for this age-old question. Back then, when Edward Snowden (a Systems Administrator at NSA) revealed about a secret program at NSA – known as PRISM, the world was shocked at it’s betrayal. Wait a minute, why should the world be shocked at this? Shouldn’t the United States be the only one that was affected? Is the United States planning for a tyranny on the world? I just read your mind, to list the questions ahead :p The answer is, PRISM collects information(content/metadata) about individuals from Big Brothers like – Apple/Yahoo/AOL/Google etc, and stores them in it’s massive data centers. This, in turn, can help to listen to any conversations/emails eavesdropping into anyone’s account in any of the service providers mentioned above. This literally means, the whole world who are dependent on any of the services listed above, are likely to be subjected under the so-called mass surveillance programme. You may still remain a optimist, and still hold on your views on the topic tagged with the conspiracy label, but there are people who have evangelized these discordant views, in-spite of their lives being stake. I’m still not vetting on this, because I have no enough data-points to prove, but this will still be an eye-opener to those, who implicitly trust the Government for all it does.
Everything is good and fine. What does it do with me? I’m not a terrorist, who is trying to hide my details to anyone? I’m happy with the privacy that I still enjoy.
And now we have come to the interesting part of the blog. The biggest misconception of privacy among the masses is that it only matters to the BAD People, while the good people still enjoy the fruit of privacy in their secluded garden. The case is not so. For those, who have no issues in companies/governments reading their data, I challenge them to send their Mailbox email and password to 10 of their friends(whom they trust), which literally has the lesser effect than a massive company reading all your emails. I bet 99.99% of you would still not agree with my bet, as you are still concerned about your privacy, that it is eventually difficult to share them with your trusted neighborhood. Everyone has the right to enjoy his freedom of seclusion, and thus your privacy is still at stake! There is more that privacy-breach can do to you. It can help hand-over even your positional coordinates to anonymous and venomous third-party. The Big Brothers still have your genes in hand, and a red-chip on them can make their decisions go wild, with the massive data available at hand.
Okay, brother. I agree with the point, but there is nothing that we can do to prevent this. What do you expect me to do, after reading your article?
Well, I won’t be concluding the post, with a theological sermon/preaching to abandon all your social media accounts, which even I (the Preacher) can’t do. If that is the case, then I can very well be assured that this will be the last post that you will be reading from me. Fortunately, I have a better mitigation plan for the issue.
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I have seen people, flooding Instagram posts with all sorts of personal pictures (or) check-ins that really don’t seem like check-ins. An example would be “It’s a boring day. Feeling alone”. These kinds of posts can easily be tracked by potential venomous hackers, who can instead sell your thoughts to anyone they like. With modern sentimental analysis happening in deep neural nets, this would just be a cake-walk for any techie.
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Also, stop assigning the same passwords to all of your internet accounts. People keep the same password as Gmail’s to all of their other accounts, making the job of the attacker easier. A common defensive explanation for this would be their incapability to remember many passwords. Come on !!! It’s easy for humans to memorize a 20-word stanza in 10 mins than to remember a 6-lettered password. Distinguished passwords, can help in accounts getting compromised.
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Have your privacy settings at the right level. People are still unaware of the privacy customizations that they can have on Facebook/Whatsapp, but still blindly go with the default one (Public to All). Correct privacy settings will still make us impenetrable by any vulnerabilities/malicious messages.
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Always keep yourselves updated on the latest security threats/trends, even if you are not a techie. Access to valuable information can keep your valuables safe as well 🙂
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Always look for encrypted messaging services (which are end-to-end encrypted) for communication. This can still go vulnerable, as companies can still open a back-door for other people to listen to. But let’s be optimistic and pragmatic here.
Finally, our online privacy matters, because it is our first home most of the time. We can still reduce the risk of losing our online privacy, by spending less time on digital worlds. An easy thing to get started would be to experiment it. You could prefer spending productive time Quora/Medium than Facebook, and prefer Kindles rather than Tablets for reading anything useful. I’m sure that you would end-up spending quality/happy time, when you reduce time spent on digital worlds, staking your privacy at high risk. With that note, have happy day with your friends and family 🙂