Protecting Your Privacy Online
The internet has revolutionised how we find and use information. But if we're not careful, we might be making our personal information available for everyone to see too.
Whilst many people are happy to share every detail of their lives online, many others aren't. So what are the dangers, what information are we unwittingly leaking, and how can we control what happens to our information when it's published?
Jump straight to topic:
Why does privacy matter online?
Everyone has different expectations of privacy. Children brought up on a diet of Facebook and Twitter may shrug their shoulders and say "so what?", whilst the rest of us may be horrified at the thought of our daily activities being available online for all to see.
We all have our own boundaries as to what we're happy to share online. Personal preferences aside though, there are certain cases where real harm can come from too much information being available online. Just a few examples:
- Revealing enough information for identity thieves to use: Making our address, date of birth, phone number, and other data public, can sometimes be enough for thieves to take out a loan in your name.
- Allowing hackers to guess your password reset qestions: If you forget your password you might be asked a password reset question. Are the answers to these available on your social media profiles?
- Letting burglars know when you're away: Do you 'check in' to your holiday resort when you arrive? Post holiday photos? Burglars have been known to find this information pretty useful!
- Giving away your event tickets: You might want to gloat online about those concert tickets you've got, but if you don't cover up the barcode in photos you might not end up going after all. And the same goes for anything else with a barcode - including losing your gambling winnings!
- Accidentally revealing to your boss that you're not really ill: It's never a good idea to pull a sickie from work - even less so if you then tell your colleagues on Facebook what a great time you're having. Ooopsie!
- Revealing an affair: If you use peer-to-peer payment apps, how private are your transactions? Some apps make your payment activity public by default, which can have all sorts of consequences, including unmasking cheating partners.
But does it really matter?
The examples above are pretty obvious ways in which the internet can be used against us, but what about everything else?
What harm can come from our general internet usage?
Does it matter, for example, if strangers can see all of our boring social media posts? Is it really a problem if big companies track which websites we visit? Do we really need to care that our phones can monitor our location? These are all good questions.
It's easy to think that the list of websites we visit is so trivially unimportant that no one else cares, or that only our friends pay attention to the social media posts celebrating our sport team's victory. But the 2018 revelations of how Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook data on millions of Americans brought the subject sharply into the spotlight.
In this case, the data was used to profile individuals and (to quote the whistleblower in the case) "target their inner demons" for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Away from political campaigns, other marketing companies have been using Facebook data for years for advertising purposes.
The amount of information that we reveal on Facebook, often just by clicking "like", can be scary. Watch this video from the BBC & CIFAS, a UK fraud prevention agency, to see what you might be giving away.
For 5 years from 2010, Facebook allowed anyone to collect the following data about you if your friend (not you!) clicked on their post: the about me section of your profile, actions, activities, your birthday, check-ins, history, events, games activity, groups, hometown, interests, lives, location, notes, online presence, photo and video tags, photos, questions, relationship details, relationships, religion, politics, subscriptions, website and work history.
Just by studying your "likes" companies can learn your sexual orientation, determine your political views, discover any childhood trauma, reveal drug abuse, and much much more.
You might view these practices as shady social manipulation, or you might consider it to be legitimate targetted advertising. You might think it's a massive invasion of privacy, or you might not care. But whatever your opinion, our data in the wrong hands - when done on a big scale and without any transparency - can be used to influence millions of people and affect real social change, whether for the better or worse.
Is this something we should worry about? That's down to your own personal opinion.
Even if you're not so bothered about some aspects of your personal data being public, there are cases where some data being accessible to everyone can cause real harm on a personal level. This page - and indeed this whole section of BeCyberSafe.com - is here to show you what information you might be leaking online, why it might matter, and how to prevent it.
Surprising ways in which we leak information
It's not just what we post on social media that gives away information about us. Click each of the sections below to see how you could be leaking private information without knowing it!
Ok so this first one probably isn't a surprise! Have you ever visited a website, only to then see lots of adverts on a similar topic for days to come? That's because of internet tracking.
Adverts on the web are served by huge advertising networks, such as those owned by Google and Microsoft. To help them target their adverts they track user activity, including the adverts we respond to & the websites we visit.
Whilst this might seem a bit creepy, the reality is that the data collected is largely anonymous and, even if statistical analysis did identify us, it wouldn't reveal much. There are things you can do though if you would prefer to opt-out of this - we've got a whole page dedicated to the topic of web tracking.
It's pretty obvious that social media gives away a lot of detail about ourselves - after all, we voluntarily post to it. But there's a lot more to it than just our photos and status updates.
A lot of detail can be inferred about us simply by how we respond to other people's posts - some researchers claim that just 10 of our Facebook 'Likes' will allow a computer to more accurately predict our personality than a work colleague. With 150, it will know us better than even our own family.
It's not just our Likes either; app developers receive information about us if we use their app. And whilst Facebook have tightened up what data these companies receive, some apps have previously been exploited to hoover up data on millions of us and our friends - all without our knowledge.
Facebook also know which websites you've visited if those pages have a 'Like' button on them, and even how you interact with it (eg the time of day, time between logins, etc) can be used to identify if you're in a relationship or not!
Twitter is more transparent than Facebook, but even here we can give secrets away. Who you're following can say a lot about you, whilst sometimes celebrity breakups can even be spotted before they're announced!
Did you know that photos can give away more details than we realise? The image itself may have clues to our address in the background, or the date it's posted might reveal our birthday & date of birth. But as well as this, modern cameras (including phones) will also save lots of extra information with each file, often including the exact location it was taken.
Those photos of your BBQ party? They might be revealing your address. Fugitive on the run? Yeah, posting a selfie is not the smartest of ideas!
All this data is known as "EXIF data" & is buried in the image file. You can often find this in your image viewer, or in Windows, right click on the file and select "View Properties".
Smart watches are incredibly popular for recording exercises, with many people sharing their GPS tracks on sites such as Strava or MapMyRun.
These can often reveal exactly where we live as well as our daily routine. And if you work for the military, you might even be leaking operational secrets!
You can prevent this in your privacy settings - disable the automatic upload of your workouts, and limit the visibility of your activities to just friends.
In some apps (such as Strava) you can also set a privacy zone to hide any activity around your house. It's not perfect and shouldn't be relied on to truly hide where you live, however for the majority of users it's a great feature.
Phones are something that we tend to keep with us throughout the day. As we move around though they'll often silently record where we go to learn our 'pattern of life' - this is how they know to show us traffic information just as we're leaving for work.
Both Android & iPhones do this, even working out where is home and where is work. Apple & Google insist that your data isn't shared with anyone without your permission, but if you want to turn it off then follow this guide from Business Insider for iPhones, or these instructions for Android phones.
Did you know that the apps on your phone might be tracking your location, downloading all your contacts, accessing your photos, or even listening in to your microphone? Scary huh?
Apps on both Android & iPhones should only ever request access to the bare minimum data & functionality that they need to work (your location for a mapping app, for example). Google & Apple do check these, but occasionally some rogue apps designed to steal data do manage to sneak through.
You can check the permissions that your apps are requesting by following the steps below - if an app looks to have access to something it shouldn't (a torch shouldn't need your contacts list for example) then remove the permission.
- Go to Settings
- Scroll down and click 'Privacy'
- Within here you can see all the access rights that apps can request. Review each of them to see what permissions your apps have been granted, and toggle off any that seem excessive.
- Go to Settings
- Select either Apps or Application Manager (this might vary between devices).
- Select Settings and the App Permissions (if you can't find this, go to Privacy and Safety first).
- Within here you can see all the access rights that apps can request. Review each of them to see what permissions your apps have been granted, and toggle off any that seem excessive.
Both iPhones and recent versions of Android will always ask you the first time an app needs to make use of a new permission (for example accessing your camera) - get in the habit of reviewing these each time before clicking "Allow"!
So how can we protect our privacy online?
Despite the myriad of ways we can leak information, there are a few simple steps we can take. Perhaps the easiest is just to be careful with what we post on social media, but there are other things we can do too.
Review your social media settings
The first step to controlling your privacy is to review your social media settings. Who can see your posts? What data do advertisers receive about you? And how much is shared to search engines for the world to find?
Check how websites & adverts track you
Our online activity is tracked by advertisers who want to target their ads more effectively. The internet isn't free (as the saying goes - if you're not paying for it, you're the product) but we can still control what advertisers know.
Spring clean your digital footprint
Over the years a lot of our information finds it way online & stays there. Old forgotten web accounts, historic social media posts, embarassing photos - the list goes on. Learn how to find all of this and start a spring clean!