Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, CIO of Everipedia on information privacy in digital spaces.
You probably already knew that you don’t have to be criminal, paranoid, or anti-capitalist to be very jealous of your Internet privacy rights. After all, plenty of law-abiding, merely sensibly cautious, capitalism-loving people are freaking out about the way FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) companies, and many more, are creepily tracking their every move. Then those same corporations are selling the information and making it available to governments (or, at least, not going out of their way to stop governments from getting it).
Sanger suggests the three heads of the worst-case scenario merge into one.
The corporate threat – Left unchecked, most of the biggest tech corporations will know everything about you. As they plug this into machine learning tools, they’ll most likely learn more about you than you know about yourself.
The criminal threat – Keeping your info private requires keeping it secure. Your privacy and security is not guaranteed just because the company storing it makes billions a year. You shouldn’t trust these companies.
The government threat – The tools necessary to create a police state worse than 1984 are already in place, and are supplemented by social media networks. Everything you do online can be put in government hands, whenever they demand it.
Sanger closes by sharing how he is locking down his cyber-life. He describes this as your personal. familial, and civic duty.
Think of it as cyber-hygiene. You need to wash your data regularly. It’s time to learn. Our swinish data habits are really starting to stink the place up, and it’s making the executives, criminals, and tyrants think they can rule the sty.
SOURCE: The Next Web