Privacy in the digital age means understanding how personal data is collected, stored, and shared across software, services, and communication platforms. From email and social media to AI tools and file sharing, protecting personal information requires awareness of where data goes and who controls it.
Privacy in Technology
When I was in the military, one of the things that we watched out for was too much of our personal information being released to the public. It's known as privacy, and over the years it's become more and more of a hot topic, especially with things like scammers out there. We need to be really careful about our privacy.
Privacy just means free from being observed and disturbed. It's a hot topic nowadays, and there are a lot of laws and regulations that are coming out to deal with privacy. It largely focuses on our identity and things about us.
When it comes to privacy and software we have several questions. For instance, if it's some sort of software that's installed on our computer, maybe we're storing data on our computer, or perhaps the data is being sent back and forth across our network connections, or perhaps it's being stored up in the cloud, or at some sort of custodian area where there's a company that we're storing data with.
Let's use email as an example. In this case we could be operating off of a client. I could have client software installed on my machine — and is that client software secure? Is it encrypting the data? What happens if my laptop is stolen, or my desktop is stolen, or what happens if it's compromised? Is it secure being stored on the computer, or is it secure in transit?
If I'm sending email, I don't consider that a secure form of communication, so I never put personal information in there. Social Security numbers I don't put into email. I just consider it as being insecure, and so I don't store that private information in there. And where is it being stored — what are the email services that are being used, what are they doing with my information and my email, are they handling it securely?
A lot of times when we're talking about privacy, it's really focusing on our identity and things about us. Maybe our medical history, maybe it has to do with our school background. So really it has to do with personal information about us, not necessarily what we're sending through our email, but what information is being collected on us from those data custodians.
Free software isn't a great example of this, because you might be storing information or sending information, but a lot of times when you sign up for free services it's either like a trial basis and they want to get you to buy their full product, or a lot of times what they're doing is they're taking that data, they're storing data about you and how to market toward you. So they're either selling that data to somebody else, or they're using it as a marketing channel to get more services in front of you and upsell you on different products.
A great example of this might be things like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. These are all free social media services that are out there, and what are they doing? They're collecting information on you and then putting advertising out in front of you. That's how they make their money: people pay for advertising space to put ads in front of you. Sometimes that's not a big deal, but sometimes we might be concerned about that.
Email is another great example. There are a lot of free services out there. I'm a big fan of Gmail, but because of that I've also turned over a certain amount of rights and lost a certain amount of privacy because I use those Gmail accounts.
There's also software out there for file sharing. What info am I storing in those drives that I have available, and if I'm sharing it out, who am I sharing it out to? Sometimes when I share it out, I share it out to a specific person that needs to log into the system and then they can have access to it. But other times I could accidentally share it out to the world by saying, okay, give me a link, and I'll send that link to the person, not realizing that that opens that up to the rest of the world. So there are some privacy concerns over that.
There are some growing concerns over instant messaging and text messaging and insecure methods of communicating back and forth, which has allowed the market to open up for some third-party apps — things like Signal, that does do encryption and keeps things a little more private.
And by using AI, we're typing data into AI, which could then generate ways of marketing to you. Or perhaps they're just taking that information and using it for other purposes, using it for training the AI engine. So when we use AI we've got to consider that an insecure form, unless we purchase certain services that are a more secure way of using AI.
Thankfully, us as consumers are winning the battle. There are more and more laws and regulations that are being put into place that are regulating companies to make sure that they're securing our data, that they are treating our data correctly, and that we know exactly what's going on with our data.
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