Guess what. You’ve been invited to a party, and you’re the guest of honor! OK, maybe not so much a party as a mugging. Oh, and it’s BYOP.
Your hosts will offer privacy protection, but trust me, you’re going to want to bring your own privacy.
Your privacy is under attack. Some new laws, such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act, offer some tools for defending yourself, but the details of this law reveal just how much data companies are collecting on you. For example, detailed logs of your online activities, a breadcrumb trail of your movements, biometric facial data, and demographic and interest data used to target you with just the right ads.
We enjoy a highly connected, linked-up online world that gives us remarkable power and freedom to go where we want. To watch and read what we want, when we want. To meet with others, do business and connect with family members. To go shopping in a world-spanning supermarket without getting up from our chairs. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do all these things without worrying about being spied on or having our money, identity or personal information stolen?
But this highly connected online world is also a den of thieves, spies and con artists. The freedom is great, but they enjoy just as much freedom to do their thing. With all your freedom comes a corresponding level of vulnerability.
It’s common to draw an analogy with the offline world. There, too, we want to be able to go where we want without being stalked. But the minute we step out the door of our homes, we are vulnerable. We’re even vulnerable in our homes, behind those solid walls. So it’s not surprising that our online freedom can also be violated. But in fact, the risks we face online are more common, more insidious and, to make it worse, often completely invisible.
Companies are developing sophisticated algorithms that can analyze information about you to the point where they know you — as a consumer — better than you know yourself. If you show the slightest interest in, say, power saws or food processors, you’ll shortly be bombarded with ads for power saws or food processors. Or male enhancement products you’re pretty sure you have never indicated any interest in. It’s easy to imagine that you’ll soon be walking down the street, and hidden cameras will be tracking your eye movements so some algorithm can be building a model of your interests and hidden thoughts.
More overtly threatening, cybercriminals are exerting all their efforts to cull data about you to target you for identify theft or to steal even more sensitive information about you and your company, or your financials, or your Social Security number.
And as I say, your hosts will offer protection. Your company will claim to protect you when you’re on its system, and it probably will do its best to protect you from outside risks. But what about risks to your privacy from the company itself or from fellow workers inside the perimeter?
Just like the classic movie trope, “The call is coming from inside the house,” sometimes the risk is closer than you think. Your internet service provider can screen against certain kinds of risks, but it, being a bigger target, is subject to more intense efforts by the bad guys. And there are some kinds of risks that your ISP can’t protect you against.
The government will try to protect you, but look what happened with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. It didn’t matter what the government was doing; Facebook decided how your data was used. I believe these institutions will fail us and that we can’t trust them. I’m not counseling cynicism here. It’s just that your privacy is too important to be left to others.
Increasingly, people get it. And they are saying, “There’s got to be something I can do to protect my privacy.” And that's where the idea of bring your own privacy comes in. Because there are things you can do to protect your privacy despite the limitations of your company, the government and big tech.
The home analogy is often invoked: Online privacy is like protecting your home. And in some ways, the analogy works, but in some ways, it doesn’t. The most important way it doesn’t fit is that online security is a lot more complicated than putting locks on your doors and alarms on your windows.
The most important way it does fit is that, ultimately, your home is your home. If you own it, you own its security. And online, that’s exactly the lesson of bring your own privacy: Although other parties may offer safeguards, you ultimately must own your own cybersecurity.
So what does that mean? How do you bring your own privacy? It’s pretty simple, really. Educate yourself about the risks. Understand the various tools and regulations — like the CCPA — that can help you. Learn what practices you can deploy to safeguard yourself, and act on that knowledge. And then repeat those three steps, because the risks change all the time.
But if you do this, if you make this effort, you’ll have the ultimate security: the security of knowing you are taking charge of your online life.
