A headline today in the Motley Fool's great online financial site entitled The Best Gift to Give Yourself This Year, made me think about what might really be a great gift to give yourself, and at little to no cost. How about the notion of enhanced privacy? Or really what we are talking about is more anonymity, especially online.
In the last year I have seen and have personally used a number of great technological tools and best practices to help minimize my exposure and vulnerability to excess data proliferation.
Now, I am no technological Luddite or privacy alarmist, and I believe in and understand how the Internet works and how the low-cost model has benefited the modern world thanks to advertising. Yet, I am sure you have all seen quite often in the press the exaggerated reviews about services and applications that if used on your smartphone, would threaten the very existence of Western Civilization!?!!. I benefit fro many of these applications myself, but we are very very quickly coming to the point where the value proposition is tilting too favorably in the other direction against regular consumers.
First up a couple of behavioral changes that you should consider adopting in 2013. For example, don't get in the habit of logging in to new applications or websites with your Facebook or Twitter or any other 3rd party credentials. I realize it is expeditious and convenient, but it allows not only the 3rd party site (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) to continue to build a profile of you, but it lengthens the bread crumb trail of your actions and activities on the web. If you every want to disappear forever, you'll have a rough time of it since you left so many clues as to your possible whereabouts and past behaviour.
Second, start to take notice of new windows that pop-up in and around websites offering you the ability to control the cookie and ad choices that are shown to you. You can begin to be much more proactive about what cookies some websites are allowed to leave on your machine when you visit that site. Most European websites (and some of the more forward-looking U.S. sites) now offer up an express consent option when you visit the site for the first time, to control how the site will track you now and in the future. A great product from a company called Evidon which services up the "AdChoices' icon on some websites will allow you to proactively opt-out of being tracked by hundreds of tracking companies with one click on a page on their website. Thru Evidon's Open Data Partnership (ODP), users can easily manage the profiles
that different companies have created about them and their interests.
As for technology, and for the more paranoid among us, I have been using a browser called Tor lately that really hides or disguises your activities online. The service works by 'bouncing' your communications around a distributed network of
relays around the world you connect to which is run by volunteers (i.e. you, if you use the browser). Tor prevents someone from
watching your Internet connection and building a profile on you via the sites you visit. An added benefit is that the browser prevents the sites you visit from learning your actual physical location,
and it lets you access sites which are blocked - which your IT guys at work will no doubt love. (as I was writing this blog, I fired up the Tor browser and the IP address that my machine was displaying to the outside world made it appear as though I was in the Czech Republic. Good stuff!)
This is just a short list of technologies and behavioral changes that you can easily adopt to improve your privacy posture in the new year. Almost all of these services and activities are free. In most cases, the cost is nothing more than a few extra minutes of your time to set a profile or check a box on a website. Generally, there is nothing to pay for. All you need to do is start to pay attention.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
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