Data Privacy Day: Why you should be worrying about your Privacy?

Posted by Rose Molly on January 28th, 2019

Both private companies and government organizations have far-reaching accessibility to our private data. In this article, we may learn about the challenges to our online privacy while discussing about the views and risks we tend to take when we put our data online.

Identity theft, data mining, government surveillance, stalking, password phishing, online bullying, clickjacking, data malware, share fake news, the vulnerabilities of internet are too many to reckon.

Recent Surveys have shown that the young generation hold a contrasting attitude about data privacy in comparison to the older folks. They are likely to disapprove government mass surveillance of our private information, but being chilled out with sharing all sorts of private data on social media.

Every advancement in technology keeps on making it increasingly easy for the government officials with enormous accessibility for intruding our private lives. Every text, email, phone conversation, online purchase, location, credit card purchases, internet search, social media posts are made potentially available to the FBI, NSA (National Security Agency), or any other government organization.

Though the information should be lawfully protected, as Court approval is compulsory for any law enforcing agency to intrude our private data or communications. Also protected, by the sheer enormity of the data. Talking of FBI, it doesn’t need any appeal to actually gather information that is technically available.

However, the NSA, FBI, and other bodies have a patterned past about adhering the laws restricting the access to user’s information. With no surprise, threat of terrorism provided an extra motivation for availing every possible tool to gather information—whether legal, or illegal, or anything in between. For instance, the courts set up for considering the intelligence agency request of obtaining user’s data from ISP’s (internet service providers) have hardly denied the permission.

We have witnessed a constant tug–of–war between law–enforcing bodies and civil liberty organizations to increase or decrease the new rules of data access. Whistle blower Edward Snowden helped in making this tug–of–war a national debate. So if you are unhappy with government’s scheme of mass surveillance, you have got a good reason to be more concerned.

Advancements in technology have made it easier for private firms to collect personal profiles of users. Whether it is your income, what you buy, your interests, politics, and what not is all collected and amassed into one space. A separate industry is formed around collecting and hawking all that information which is available.  There are a lot of companies working on developing technical tools that can easily fetch data, or track online activities, and also there are companies who buy such data from different sources to compile it later.  Also there are several other businesses’ which package user’s data into separate products which is afterwards sold to advertisers.

As the official Data Privacy Day, January 28, the theme With Respect to Data Privacy, is Enabling Trust and Safeguarding Data.

What is Data Privacy Day?

An international effort in January 2008, Data Privacy Day began in the United States and Canada as an addition to the Data Protection Day celebrated in Europe. Officially led by NCSA (the National Cyber Security Alliance), Data Privacy Day commemorates the legal, international treaty dealing with data privacy and protection.

Platforms like Signal-encrypted messaging application are free—yet absolutely private and secure —providing end-to-end encryption unlike others making money by trading user’s data to advertising agencies. But again, how aware are we of these safer options, to restrict any unauthorized collection of private data by third-party?

We only make it easy for those third party users to collect our private information. By using platforms that are neither encrypted nor secure, we tend to give oodles of data away for absolutely free.

Only few of billions internet users are concerned about any third–party agency or user accessing our private data. But the real question is How concerned are you?

Source: http://dataprivacycoalition.org/data-privacy-day-why-you-should-be-worrying-about-your-privacy/

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Rose Molly

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Rose Molly
Joined: November 13th, 2018
Articles Posted: 33

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