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How your data is being used and what you can do to protect it — by Jack Filiba
Many people have come to accept that sacrificing privacy is, in many ways, just the cost of modern living. As the commodity that we most often unwittingly trade, we surrender our privacy in exchange for using services, interacting with online platforms, and just being part of society. Yet this does not have to be the case, and it is not too late for us to regain some of the privacy that we desperately need and deserve.
Tools like Have I Been Pwned? allow you to see how many times information connected to your email address has circulated online. Your email address has probably been connected to all sorts of breaches in the past few years, due to a website or service losing your information.
According to Cyber Security Hub, there were more than 4,100 publicly disclosed data breaches in 2022 alone. The largest data breaches to take place in 2022 impacted Twitter, Uber, Twilio, DoorDash, Optus, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Medibank.
As one of Australia’s largest medical insurance providers, the Medibank breach garnered significant attention last year. According to The Guardian, it impacted 9.7 million users. Information exposed in the leak included personally identifiable data and worse still, for many Medibank customers, the company believes that information such as codes related to the diagnoses and procedures they received and the names of their practitioners were accessed as well.
In a world where it is clear that our private information is often not kept safe, the massive amount of data collection that we are subject to is concerning. Companies collecting — and failing to safeguard — our information, however, is only one of many ways in which our privacy is being worn away.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the most widely known advocate organizations for digital rights, new technologies are enabling “unparalleled invasions of privacy.” In particular, our privacy is under significant threat due to the increasing ways in which users’ personal data is being collected and exploited, widespread government surveillance programs, and the use of facial recognition technology.
A report last year from the United Nations found that threats to privacy and human rights are growing. Among the report’s findings, it states: “Before the advent of large-scale automated surveillance and data analytics tools, there were practical limitations to surveillance that provided a certain level of protection for individuals, even when in public. Sophisticated digital tools render those past “natural” protections moot. Today, a single officer can monitor the social media accounts of dozens of people and, with the assistance of advanced software and big data analytics, small teams can observe and profile thousands of accounts.”
Even the way that we spend money is under increased opportunity for surveillance. While cash is unlikely to disappear completely in a global context within the next few years, many parts of the world are trending towards an increasingly cashless society. According to Insider Intelligence, cash is projected to account for just 10% of point-of-sale transactions by 2025.
While moving away from cash may not inherently put our privacy at risk, the alternatives that we are being pushed towards might. While it is no secret that the way we spend money through our credit and debit cards is widely tracked, the birth of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) could amplify privacy concerns.
Central Bank Digital Currencies were born from the popularity of bitcoin and its underlying technology. Like bitcoin, CBDCs attempt to create digital money using blockchain technology. Yet unlike leading bitcoin, CBDCs are not decentralized. Rather, true to their name, they are entirely controlled by government institutions. According to research cited by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 105 countries and currency unions are currently exploring the possibility of launching a CBDC.
Many designs for CBDCs that are being explored in the world today involve the centralized collection of data relating to payments and transactions. As a consequence, there may be an increased risk of both unethical levels of government surveillance and increased information breaches. On this topic, the World Economic Forum writes that the development of CBDCs could pose a significant threat to our everyday privacy, particularly if policymakers do not work with experts on privacy to protect users.
Having established the scale at which our privacy is being compromised today, the question becomes how much we should reasonably care about this issue.
In 2021, an internal Facebook email was accidentally leaked to the press. As the BBC reported, this email revealed that the company’s long-term strategy in regards to data scraping incidents is to frame them as a “broad industry issue and normalize the fact that this activity happens regularly.”
By all accounts, it appears that the fact that our personal information is commonly exploited in the world today has left many of us feeling largely indifferent towards these types of incidents. Unfortunately, it appears that companies and governments are exploiting our apathy in order to continue invading our privacy.
Encouraging us not to care about privacy is not a new strategy by any means. Arguments such as the infamous quote “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” have been used for years to defend widespread surveillance programs and other intrusions into our personal lives. Yet, in the words of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, this argument is “no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Losing our privacy means losing our intrinsic human rights. Per Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
Even national security — one of the reasons most often touted against privacy — cannot be reasonably used as a catch-all to justify increasing privacy intrusions. According to a recent UN report on growing threats to privacy and human rights, new technologies are enabling the public to be surveilled in a range of online and offline contexts while often failing to be proportional, based in law, and necessary to achieve a legitimate aim.
It is important to remember that privacy is not just an immaterial concept. Breaches of our privacy can have tangible real-world consequences. In addition to the role of digital breaches in increased incidences of threats such as stalking, harassment, and identity theft, the loss of privacy can even fundamentally undermine democracy.
As stated in the UN’s report, systematic public surveillance can threaten the ability of citizens to peacefully express themselves and participate in the democratic process. The report found that some governments in the world today are using public surveillance measures to identify critics, allowing those in opposition to a government’s agenda to be harassed, detained, or denied essential services.
For example, protestors in China last year were reportedly identified by police based on information gathered from their phones and facial recognition technology. In one story covered by The New York Times, a protestor attempted to protect his identity by wearing a balaclava and goggles. The next day, however, police officers showed up at his home and told him his phone had been active in the area of the protests.
According to The New York Times’ reporting, the Chinese government has spent a decade building mass surveillance systems that allow protestors to be identified by law enforcement. Once identified, these protestors are often intimidated, which prevents them from continuing to object to the government’s actions.
While many people in the West frequently acknowledge these types of privacy intrusions when they happen abroad, it can be easy to ignore how widely this technology is abused across many parts of the world. Brookings, a major American research group, states that Americans are all affected by mass surveillance, with surveillance methods disproportionately affecting communities of color. In particular, facial recognition is being used by about half of the country’s federal agencies that employ law enforcement officers. One out of every four state and local law enforcement agencies in the US reportedly have access to this technology as well.
There are currently a growing number of private companies in the US and many other countries across the world that partner with government agencies to collect and process personal information on a mass scale. As these technologies continue to develop, so does their potential for abuse and their ability to undermine democracy.
In the words of the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, “pervasive surveillance comes at a high cost, undermining rights and choking the development of vibrant, pluralistic democracies. […] The right to privacy is more at risk than ever before.”
Forward-thinking regulators across the world have attempted to protect our digital rights by introducing acts such as the GDPR in the EU and the CCPA in California. Still, the fact remains that regulation is lagging behind the new technologies that are being used to erase our right to privacy.
As individuals, we often contribute to this issue by trading privacy for convenience when it comes to the businesses that we interact with online. While this has become incredibly common, we do not have to accept this as a new status quo. By being more mindful of who we give our information to, and condemning the digital services that are failing us, it is possible to remind companies that privacy is something we demand and intend to maintain.
Realistically, however, this is a tall order as many large data collection platforms have become increasingly difficult to avoid. In addition, while guides like the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense guides can help mitigate the role of unethical government surveillance, this is an issue that we need to be fighting for on a larger global scale in order to see meaningful and lasting change. As surveillance technologies rapidly develop, these issues appear more timely than ever before.
In the fight for the right to privacy in a world that is increasingly insistent on taking it away, the most important thing of all is that we do not give in by becoming apathetic. After all, when a right is eroded, very rarely is it returned.
If you found this article interesting, make sure to share it with your colleagues, friends and family. Privacy can only exist when it is protected by society as a whole!
