While reading the news recently, I came across an interesting article about how an app TikTok was fined by the US courts for illegally collecting children's data. Suffice to say, this article aroused my curiosity. As I read further, I discovered that every video made using this app belongs to TikTok who is now free to use this data for their own purposes. For example, a popular YouTuber had made a few videos using TikTok but hadn’t got around to publishing them online. But TikTok sold his videos to advertise products on Facebook. Coming to the nitty-gritty of this, it would seem that the 'Terms and Conditions' of TikTok that you so easily agreed to without so much as a glance contained a clause stating that every video that you make using TikTok belong to them and can be used by them for whatever purpose they wish to.
So this got me thinking, this is merely the case of one of the apps that got caught red handed. How many other apps like this have already hoarded up our data? What do they do with it? And of course, the million dollar question: is our data really private?
But first, what is privacy? According to the Oxford dictionary, "Privacy" is defined as a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. And when it comes to the case of our data, it quite evidently shouldn't be observed by other people. But do you really think that is the case?
Do you have any idea of how much of our data mega-corporations like Google and Facebook have? If you happen to think it's insignificant, you'd be quite wrong. Many of us have android phones and almost every one of us has synced it with Google because of its convenience. It allows you to change your phone without painstakingly having to save each number one at a time to your new phone any more. You can just sync it with Google contacts and voilà! you have all your contacts with you again. But then again, we don't just sync contacts now do we? Every single photo, video, the locations we've been to, the games we've played on our phone and so on. Almost every single scrap of data about our activities on a day to day basis is in their hands.
So what do they do with this data? The Times recently published an article regarding an MNC that happened to catalog the location data of one single person. The location data was so extensive and detailed that the people from The Times were able to easily Identify whom the data belonged to and her daily schedule to the dot. Now imagine a stalker with ill-intentions getting their hands on this data. Do you still feel safe now?
Almost everyone has heard of the WikiLeaks scandal. The scandal broke in early June 2013 when the Guardian newspaper reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans for years now. That report was followed by revelations that the NSA had tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to track online communication in a surveillance programme known as "Prism".
This begs the question of how much our data is worth. Most of us have a mindset that goes along the lines of "I'm not a famous persona and thus my data is probably quite worthless". I used to be of a similar mindset until I did my research on the topic. It was then that I understood how our data can be used to subtly manipulate our minds towards decisions we wouldn't otherwise take without us even being aware of it. While all this sounds like an episode straight out of "The Twilight Zone", events like this do happen often as evident with one of the more popular scandal in recent times : Cambridge Analytica alongside social media giant Facebook used personal information taken without authorization in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalized political advertisements.
How did this happen? In 2014, an app called "thisisyourdigitallife" was created which paid hundreds of thousands of users to take a personality test which would then be used for study purposes. This app also collected the information of the test-takers' Facebook friends leading to a data pool of tens of millions strong. This data was shared with Cambridge Analytica who used this data to develop a psychographic profile of said targets and deliver tailor-made advertising to coerce each of them into voting for Trump.
This is how our collectively, each of put "insignificant" data collections was put to use for one man's gain.
Thses days most people post a lot of photo to social media site's like instagram, Facebook. This data is generally available to any one. One might think "what can be done with my pictures and video". Apparently a lot. With the improvements in Machine Learning techniques, it is trivial to make fake videos of anyone saying or doing things that never actually occurred which looks real. This technique called Deepfake, uses Generative Adversial Network(GAN) to superimpose existing images and video onto a source image or video. If you can get around 300 photos or videos of a person you can make them say or do anything. This can be done by anyone with a decent GPU as the code for this is available freely online. This technique was first used to make fake pornography of actress like Daisy Ridley , Gal Gadot these were uploaded to reddit by the user 'deepfakes'. But fake porn is not the only issue. There have been deepfakes of politicians like Barack Obama done by Jordan Peele and Jonah Peretti as a public service announcment about deepfakes. One might think that this is done only to famous people. But there was a incident where a 17 year old girl's images were stolen from social media and was doctored into pornographic videos. Individuals like her, who are not celibrities, do not have the benifit of people knowing this must be fake. This can destory a persons future employabillity and online reputation.
So now that you know what all can happen and what all is happening, you need to know what can be done to prevent or avoid these problems. The ideal solution would be to stop using these resources but that is obviously impractical. This is what Richard Mathew Stallman does. I recently attended a talk by him in which he stated that he didn't even use mobile phones, so as to preserve his privacy. So this is possible but not so practical in this pro-technological world of ours. So, what can be done?
One of the best solutions would be start using open-source resources. Since the details of open-source resources can be seen by anyone and everyone, if there does exist a problem with the resource, it will be found by someone and will be fixed. So, your privacy is definitely preserved. Another thing that you can do to avoid problems would be to read what you are agreeing to. Whenever, we create an account or download an app, we just simply agree to it's terms and conditions without reading through it. You think this is just a formality, but this terms and conditions contain the details of what they can or cannot do with your data. Or when you download or update an app from the playstore, they say the app required the following permissions and we simply click on the accept button. But remember that you are giving it permission to your data. So, before you click on any accept or agree button, read what you are agreeing to.
The problem happens when many of these open source resources do not have as many features as the proprietary ones. So, it may not be convenient for most of us to use these open-source resources. So you have to choose between convenience and privacy. Convenience and privacy do not go hand in hand at the moment. Because if you choose convenience, you have to sacrifice your privacy or if you choose privacy, you have to sacrifice your convenience. It is up to us to decide what we value - privacy or convenience. Or if you are a developer, you could develop an open source software that is convenient and private.