Is your data any secure in the modern age? Secure, maybe, but I want to discuss another aspect here. So let me clarify, I am not talking about the data breach by hacking, instead what I want to elaborate is about the personal data collected from the users by big corporations and how they are benefiting from it.
If you take Google for example they had a very simple privacy policy when they started out, the 1999 privacy policy contained just over 600 words. Moreover, they never sought to collect any personal information as such they were into segregate data collection, then. But now, the time has changed, it is wise to ask what not is being collected about the user. On a serious note have a look at the figure 1 to see it for yourself.
Well, we can't complain either, right. The internet has changed a lot in the past 20 years, Google has evolved to stay relevant. Now, Google has became more clear on the policy of data collection and its use, thanks to Europe's General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) agency.
Let us take location data for example, Fig 2 shows google's policy, not only do they keep track of you even though you aren't using any of their services but they save all these data to your account once you are back online. Going offline isn't enough to stop them tracking us. You have an option to turn off the logging but it's on by default. Now, Google allows the user to download all the data that has been collected about them. Fig 3, shows a small snapshot of the location data that google had collected about me.
The "activity" variable got my attention it has got many types like "still","in_vehicle","cycle" etc. Not only they know the location but it also knows what we are doing. An anecdote from my side, once I used the google navigation to drive to a restaurant. I parked the car a little far from the restaurant, while I was placing my order, I got a notification on my mobile from the Google maps app saying it has saved the location where I parked the car. Pretty, nice feature isn't it. But what creeped me out is when I went back to the car, I got another notification from Google to rate that restaurant.
So, I downloaded all the location data and parsed the latitude and longitude coordinates and plotted it on a map, refer Fig. 4.
Isn't this mindblowing, just image how much data they got from all the users. If a product is free, you are the product, how true is that in this context. I have only scratched the surface of data collection by the tech giants. The bigger tech giants like Facebook, Twitter etc has come under severe pressure from regulatory boards around the world on the issue of privacy of the user. The main issue is with the lesser known free apps, they aren't obliged to disclose like Google for example the data that have been collected from the user.
So, there no other option, if you don't want these companies to track you, better stay off the internet. Not an option for most of us, isn't it. Privacy is dead in this modern digital era.
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