Two companies, Google and Facebook, are mainly blamed for scandals related to poor privacy protection. These corporations have gathered a gigantic database of information about the private affairs of their users. They know everything about them. We show you how to defend against espionage.
Table of Contents
Protect your Google and Facebook account – you are threatened by identity theft
- Use a password that is difficult to crack, built of random characters (e.g. RdfVC43) sD @ # W). You can remember them in your browser, for example.
- Avoid banal questions and answers in the password reset mechanism. Use an answer that a person who knows you well cannot guess.
- Use a browser with strong security (the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome and Opera), avoid Internet Explorer, which is most often attacked.
- Use software that protects against Trojans and keyloggers, because even the best password can be stolen by a worm.
According to expert reviews, Google has the world’s largest collection of private data. Kevin Bankston of the Online Privacy Foundation – Electronic Frontier Foundation – when asked, says: Google knows more about you than its own mother. It is worrying that this treasury could fall into the wrong hands.
What does Google know about you?
By collecting keywords entered into the search engine and information about the pages you came on, the company knows almost everything about your interests (data is associated based on the IP address). Learn more from letters stored in Gmail. He will meet your friends from the contact list.
Blogger and Picasa online albums users provide even more information. The latter service is equipped with a face recognition mechanism, so the system can detect friends in photos and associate them with Gmail email addresses. What’s more, your data on Google can be even more precisely associated with your person, if, for example, you provide your company with a credit card number in order to purchase additional disk space.
Google also encourages you to provide your geographical position, which is the purpose of the Google Latitude service for mobile. He also wants you to share your health data in Google Health, which is already operating in the US and will soon be coming to Poland.
Even if you are not a Google user, it does not mean that there is no data about you. They can be stored in other users’ accounts. Anyway, your house has probably been photographed and everyone will be able to view it on Street View.
Check what data you have collected on Google
The easiest way to do this is at www.google.com/dashboard . All Google services you have ever used are listed there. Each of them has a status informing about the data that is stored in connection with the given service on Google’s servers. Each entry has links to pages that allow you to edit or delete stored data. If the service has information about privacy settings, you’ll find links to them here.
Little private Facebook
The situation with Facebook looks no better, where virtually everyone opens an account under their own name. Everyone, even if you don’t let him into your profile, can find out what you look like, because the photo with the name and part of the list of friends is the so-called public profile and goes to Google.
Most of the things you post on your Facebook profile are private. However, the default privacy settings mean that much of this information is available to all Facebook users! In accordance with the privacy policy, which, by the way, no one reads, Facebook can pass information from your profile to the companies with which it cooperates. These are mainly advertisers, application developers and profile add-ons.
Marketing and spam
Google and Facebook design their services to encourage users to provide them with as much information as possible. These services make life easier, but the fee for using this feature is our data. A lot of the information you provide is sold to advertisers as so-called behavioral profiles. Thanks to them, marketers can tailor ads to your interests.
In addition, your private data is used to promote the services themselves. Facebook encourages you to share a mailbox to help you find friends. However, these addresses can also be used to send incentives to join Facebook on your behalf. Google does the same.
Identity theft
The fact that both sites are a repository of news about you is a threat. Imagine what could happen if a hacker got into your correspondence, documents, payment service, photos, life information or contacts. It is not difficult, considering that the whole is protected by a password that you are likely to use elsewhere.
Well-known people, such as the candidate for the office of US Vice President Sarah Palin, did not avoid stealing private data. Her all correspondence went to the public website after the hacker broke into her account, answering the password reset question. He knew the answer thanks to a thorough examination of information available in Google search engine.
Nosy service
Information stored in Google and Facebook databases is also of interest to special services. The United States regularly monitors electronic signals, including information flowing over the internet (the notorious Echelon system). They are currently searching for traces of terrorist activity in this way, but one can imagine that in the future governments will hunt the perpetrators of much less dangerous crimes and offenses in the future.
Once placed on the network, the data remains there, so if not now, then in the future someone may want to profile Internet users for security purposes.
Although there is no evidence of mass monitoring of citizens by governments, it is common to use data from criminal websites. Although Google and Facebook do not officially agree to forward all data to services, they share it when the prosecutor’s office asks for information about a specific user. Debt collectors also use profiles on websites, in which they learn a lot about the debtor’s condition.
Friends also menacing
Friends can use our data in bad faith. If you carelessly throw a video on Facebook, e.g. from a sharply sprinkled party, a “friendly” work colleague can send a photo to your boss.
In the near future you can expect a worsening situation, because the longer we think about Google and Facebook policy, the more it can be seen that these companies are not interested in guaranteeing privacy to users.
