We all want to ensure and safeguard our online privacy. There are many products and services fighting for privacy, from private browsing modes and tracker blockers to private VPNs. However, online privacy is a myth, and offline privacy can also be one of them.
Yes, a Myth
Myths are stories (or narratives) that are often central to a society’s beliefs. The Myth of Online Privacy Seems Like This Privacy is a central concept in our society. To the extent that we accept online privacy it is not a reality, it is as if we have lost it. But something we can possibly restore with the appropriate software tweaks, behavior or even regulations.
If you think about it, the notion of online privacy is actually beneficial to industries that profit from its absence. We’re all in agreement that privacy isn’t online, but let us be the search engine, and we’ll endlessly search for anything that comes to our minds, including potentially sensitive topics like medical issues. Police can even search these search histories to find criminals.
Breaking the Privacy Illusion
We all know that internet privacy is not something we can enjoy. But do you know how much privacy you have?
First of all, whenever you browse online, your internet service provider, whether it’s a home internet connection or a cellular data connection, will be able to see all the websites you are visiting. In the US, you can also sell your browsing information. Your mobile carrier may track and sell your app usage activities.
When you visit any website, it will see your IP address and use it to track you on every visit. However, it is likely to also load a lot of tracking scripts. These tracker networks can track your actions on various websites. This is one of the reasons why advertisements shop on the internet after searching for a certain item. Even if you have deleted cookies, there are many ways to track your browser.
“The cloud” is just someone else’s computer. If you upload your files to the cloud without using end-to-end encryption – something most services don’t offer – your files can be viewed and accessed by the company that owns the cloud service. This also goes for messages and emails that are not encrypted.
Okay, you might know all you need to know, but did you know that advertisers can link your purchases and shopping trips to the ads you see? Google, for example, has a product that does this. It uses the opaque “transaction data” that is sent to the advertiser or aggregated anonymous data from third-party sources” to monitor credit card usage.
Did you realize that Facebook’s advertising tools are so specific that you can narrow your ad audience so narrowly that you can only show them to one person?
Government surveillance is standard. Edward Snowden drew attention to the massive warrantless surveillance of phone and internet data. The NSA’s XKeyScore software is said to provide real-time search and access to the massive amount of data being logged in regards to online activity.
However, the online world is not completely different from the physical world. There are a variety of automatic license plate readers in the US and many of them are linked in a massive network. Even if you leave the computer and go for a walk, your movements are being tracked and recorded. Amazon may be delivering videos from its Ring doorbell camera to authorities without their explicit consent. You can also be tracked using your cell phone’s location information.
What Can You Even Do?
This article can be extended with additional examples. There are several other examples if you do some digging. It is difficult to comprehend the massive amount of data that is being collected, processed and analyzed all the time.
There are no perfect solutions. Private browsing disables the browser’s ability to store your history and also provides temporary cookies. However, your IP address is still visible. You can choose not to use Facebook, however, Facebook has a shadow profile on you. While you can use a VPN to protect your privacy, you will need to sign up for a service eventually. This will link your identity to the VPN and you will be trusting a VPN that is unlikely to keep logs.
So what can you do? You can do damage to him. If you’re live-streaming your life throughout the day, turning off the camera means less data is available.
You can use a VPN along with private browsing mode to hide your browsing. However, don’t just trust a VPN and be aware that you are trusting the VPN. You can also use Tor, although there are security holes in Tor. You can use more secure encrypted services, for example messages on Signal instead of regular SMS messages. You can also keep your confidential files more secure by storing them locally or securely encrypting them before uploading them to online storage.
Yes, you can go even further by using cash, for example, or creating face accessories that thwart facial recognition cameras.
What’s the Point? Threat Modeling 101
However, as you’re using Tor on the computer running Tails trying to figure out how to get off the grid without actually getting off the grid, you might be thinking What’s the point?
We don’t want to give up, but we do want to consider the things you’re actually defending yourself against.
It’s all about your threat model – what are you really trying to protect yourself against? You can determine what you are most concerned about keeping private and take steps to prevent that information from being lost.
This is not the most effective form of “online privacy”. There is no simple way to turn off your privacy switch and regain your mythical privacy. But there are ways to protect specific information and make it more private.