Privacy was sickened when internet was born, died when
social media grow and buried when electronic devices get smart. Can we regain our
privacy? … for sure we can minimize invasion of our privacy
According to his “why privacy matters” TED talk, Glenn
Greenwald conducted an experiment to check whether
people care about their privacy or not. He found out that some people responded
to him that they don’t care about their privacy because they are not bad people
or that they do not involve in nothing wrong to hide from others.
Then he asked them to email him their email
login information (password). He said, no one was willing to send out the password.
From this, it is possible to see the fact that the majority of us care about our
privacy.
I care about my privacy not because I am a bad person or I am
involving in wrong action, but because I don’t know who is breaching my privacy
for what reason. I am fine with some entities such as government who do so for
the sake of protection of the public; I like to get some discounted sales
information to save money if it is by my consent. What I don’t want is the fact
that Mr. Unknown hook into my system for no reason but to steal my identity information.
How many of us can guess the number of third parties who
track us every time we visit a website URL? Firefox has come up with a great add-ons
called
Lightbeam (called
Collusion in its experimental version), “Lightbeam is an add-on for Firefox
that displays third party tracking cookies placed on the user's computer.” It is
a light weight easy to install software. After watching a TED talk by Gary Kovacs (Tracking
our online trackers), I installed this tool and I found out the
following results. Visiting 8 websites with their extension and libraries
raised my vested website number into 30, but there were 275 third party
websites connected to me without my knowledge and consents.
The best part about this add-ons is the option it gives to
turn on the tracking protection setting to block the trackers.
Thank you for reading my blog and I will come back next week
Farris
References
Most end users do not care much about their privacy. Now, it is our(security professionals in training) responsibility to provide more information on how individuals can protect their privacy. It is time to protect our privacy by using secured forms of communication on our smart devices.
ReplyDeleteI think cyber education is prominently necessary for our society. We all are studying about cyber threats and how to protect ourselves from those attacks. But what about the people, who are not even aware about these attacks. I think there should be some activities for raising awareness about smartphones and social media privacy issues in the society.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think is the solution for the third parties that track the cookies?
ReplyDeleteWell here is where professional, social and cyber ethics should come to work together. Trackers are the only one who know why they track, though it doesn’t work for everyone just notifying or requesting users/consumer consent better to be considered unless the tracking purpose is to hunt criminals, which is really rare case.
Deletefrom technology perspective, technology that avoid cookies can be used - up to browser providers ... advantage versus disadvantage of cookies.
great post farris. I was not aware that firefox had that add-on. But in this day and age where on companies are paying social media sites to gain information. So i guess privacy is not what it used to be and that we have to give up some privacy in this day and age.
ReplyDelete