Reclaim your privacy by distancing from Facebook and Google
I was only a teenager when I started using Google and Facebook. At the time I didn’t know and didn’t care much about online privacy. My first reaction to anyone who would raise to me such concern would have been
“I have nothing to hide and it’s free”.
I remember when I was in high school we had a school meeting to address the rapid spreading of social networks and how this would affect our lives as students and the relations with each other and our professors.
During the meeting I had a pitch in which I endorsed the social networks behaviour because: “Internet should be free for all and self regulated” and again, “you are responsible of the contents and the data you publish”.
Now I realise how naive my ideas were at that time. Little did I know on how data can be used to profile and define your identity not only online but in the “real world” too.
The problem with profiling people is that once the profiling algorithm has enough data about you, it becomes resilient to changes. The same person can behave and essentially be different depending on the many variables. I myself have changed a long way from who I was just a few years ago. I don’t think I would have been able to reinvent myself as much if my employers, my insurance company or even my girlfriend would have had access to a detailed however decontextualized profile of who I had been so far, what were my beliefs and my aspirations.
Here is when “profiling” becomes “defining” and we’ve given up our freedom and right to change, grow up and essentially, evolve. Or at least we’ve made it more challenging.
For the sake of argument, there are many other ways your data may be exploited: to discriminate you if you are part of a specific ethnic group, political party or just if you don’t seem to be appreciating company products so much. Your data could also be used to raise your health insurance premium based on your past medical or family history.
What data do apps collect about you?
Apart from those data that you willingly give away with your registration and app usage such as your name, email, phone number, public photos, posts and messages, there are other data that an app can collect.
Those data are often referred to as “metadata” and they basically consist of the time of your post, picture, the location, the people you addressed, or tagged, etc. Those metadata are not only collected by social networks but also by other apps such as messaging apps. Although the contents of your messages stay private, the metadata are routinely collected.
How to avoid sharing your data?
There are several ways to avoid sharing your data or at least limit the amount of data shared. Personally, examining my app usage, I found out that despite me being registered on all the main socials and messaging apps, I didn’t really use all of them. So, the first step is to consider which apps we are actually using and ask ourselves if we can do without them.
Once we have identified which apps we don’t need, we can cancel our data and registration. Here in Europe, because of GDPR, you always have the possibility of requesting your data to be erased from any server within the EU but similar rules apply abroad too (with some exceptions).
Personally I found it quite easy to renounce Facebook and Instagram. More difficult will be to give up YouTube because for me, it is like watching Netflix albeit you don’t need a profile to watch YouTube videos and if you use a VPN your datas are encrypted.
This brings us to the next step: use a VPN service to encrypt your browsing data. There are plenty out there. I’m personally using SurfShark but sometimes it is not as fast as I would like. I’m actually very excited of Mozilla VPN announcement since Mozilla has bet everything on user privacy: https://vpn.mozilla.org
Switch to a different search engine. Google is the best, most reliable search engine although it is known for collecting your data. One of the best alternatives I found (that I set as default search engine) is DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com
Regarding the messaging apps, the most popular ones that come to mind are WhatsApp and WeChat. However, Covid-19 pandemic has taught me that despite having many contacts on my phone, I really connect with only few of them so why “popular” should be even a parameter in choosing a messaging app?
If it is not the most popular messaging app that you’re looking for but one that does not collect your metadata, a valid alternative is called Signal, both for Android and iOS. Just make sure you ask your closest contacts if they’re willing to use it as well.
Finally, “Rome wasn’t built in one day”. “Socially distancing” yourself from social networks and other apps you’re so used to after many years usually takes some time.
Change is not easy and could be more challenging for some people than for others. However, if there’s a lesson we can all learn from Covid-19 pandemic is that change is possible and that sometimes we can find in the adversities the push we need to change for good.
Browse safely! 😷
