Reality Check: Is Your Personal Data Safe Online? (VIDEO)

By Ben Swann, Truth in Media | 

The Facebook scandal involving personal data mishandled by Cambridge Analytica has raised concerns over the privacy of the information we share on our social media accounts.

Some countries have gone as far as to legislate Internet data privacy with laws granting the “right to be forgotten.”

Yet Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says we don’t need such regulations here in the states. Is he right?

This is a Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.

It’s an unsettling thought: your personal data, being manipulated on a global scale. Where you live, what kind of car you drive, how many children you have, what food you eat, how much you money you earn, what clothes you wear, how you exercise, the list goes on and on.

While other countries are tightening laws on Internet privacy and how corporations can use your data, such as the UK’s data protection law with its “right to be forgotten,” the United States seems to be stuck in the 1980s on the issue.

In California, privacy is a right in the state constitution. “Privacy” was added to the state’s “inalienable rights” by the legislature in 1972.

And though California has been a leader in privacy, the last meaningful update to the state’s privacy laws was in the 1980s, long before today’s technology.

For context, Census data shows that in 1989, 15 percent of American households owned a computer.

Today, according to Pew Research, 77 percent of Americans have a smartphone—a computer in their pocket or purse.

And in 2015, those smartphone owners used about 27 smartphone apps per month, according to Statista.

Just think about all of the information you give to the apps on your smartphone. Do you read their terms of use?

You know you don’t. And yet, a California-based group called the Californians for Consumer Privacy has raised concern about how our information is collected and sold.

From that group came the California Consumer Privacy Act. The act is intended to not only hold major corporations making $50 million per year or more responsible for their consumers’ data, but also giving Californians the right to know where and to whom their data is being disclosed or sold, and if their data is being properly protected.

There’s nothing in California today that allows users see what data has been collected on them. And data is being collected everywhere you go.

From the checkout at Target, to your Facebook account, browsing the Internet or even just walking on a city street—credit cards are being swiped, messages are being shared, and cameras are recording.

So are the rules of how businesses use your data fair and respectful of your privacy?

One of the key aspects of the California Consumer Privacy Act is a right of action against companies that store data but have not taken reasonable steps to secure that data. That means consumers can sue companies that didn’t protect their data.

What exactly “reasonable steps” means needs to be fleshed out in the courts, but there are plenty of examples of companies that didn’t take “reasonable steps” until after data was compromised.

From December 19, 2013, “Target says hackers breached its system and stole 40 million credit card numbers.”

From September 18, 2014, “Almost immediately after word broke that Home Depot had been hacked, security experts were noting that the breach was likely even worse than the massive Target that had preceded it.”

From October 2, 2014, “JP Morgan just revealing that an August data breach could affect 76 million households.”

From February 5, 2015, “One of America’s largest health insurers, Anthem, this morning confirmed a massive data breach. Reports say hackers may have stolen up to 80 million records. No credit card or medical information is in danger, but Social Security numbers, birthdays and addresses may have been compromised.”

What you need to know is that when we provide information to a corporation, we establish a relationship.

We believe the corporation will use our information for the purpose of their service. Once your information is outside of the intended use, it’s nearly impossible to control it.

And third party sharing of your data allows it is be used, shared and disseminated without any control on your part. Big data is powerful force in the United States. But should big data be allowed to do whatever it wants with your information. If not, how do we, as the public, get some control back?

Let’s talk about that, right now, on social media, while someone collects our data.

The post Reality Check: Is Your Personal Data Safe Online? (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Concerned About What Facebook Knows About You? Check Out What Google Knows

Many users have been dropping Facebook, ceasing to use social media, or looking into the data that’s been collected about them.  But if you think that what Facebook knows about you is scary, check out what Google knows about you.

Dylan Curran, an information technology consultant, took a look at just what Google knew about him. Even with his experience as a web developer, he was shocked. “I was really like: ‘Oh, my God. This is preposterous,"” Curran said. When he requested his data from Google, he found that it was constantly tracking his location in the background, including calculating how long it took to travel between different points, along with his hobbies, interests, possible weight, income, data on his apps, and records of files he had deleted.  But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Although Curran thinks what Google is doing is harmless and not at all malicious (we’ll agree to disagree there), he did say it’s a little unsettling that the tech giant knows so many things about him and he feels uncomfortable now that he knows how closely he’s being tracked.

“It’s wrong to trust any entity that big with so much information,” he said. “They’re just trying to make money,” and at some point, “someone is going to make a mistake.” But this information and revelation definitely struck a chord with some, and they aren’t happy about it. Curran’s original tweet now has 159,000 talking about it.

Want to freak yourself out? I"m gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

Google tracked every single place Curran had been, right down to how long he was there and the time he left.

2. This is every place I have been in the last twelve months in Ireland, going in so far as the time of day I was in the location and how long it took me to get to that location from my previous one pic.twitter.com/I1kB1vwntT

— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018

“All Google users are being tracked by default in terms of physically where [they’re] going and located,” Scott J. Shackelford, an associate business professor at Indiana University focusing on cybersecurity law and policy said, according to NBC News. “That is shocking to a lot of people.”

A spokesperson for Google wanted the public to know that everyone needs to be aware of their online privacy choices and review them regularly. “In order to make the privacy choices that are right for them, it’s essential that people can understand and control their Google data,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Over the years, we’ve developed tools like My Account expressly for this purpose, and we’d encourage everyone to review it regularly.”

Google has made an array of privacy tools available through the My Account feature. It will allow users see their personal data and tracking history.  It also allows people to turn off tracking mechanisms or delete individual pieces of data they want gone from the archives.

 

A Journalist Just Discovered the True Cost of the ‘Free’ Tinder Dating App — and It’s Terrifying

(ANTIMEDIA)  — In a piece that speaks directly to life in the modern age, French journalist Judith Duportail just detailed for The Guardian what happened after she requested from dating app Tinder that she be sent all her personal data.

With the help of a privacy activist and a human rights attorney, Tinder granted her request. But she says the sheer volume of information she received was “way more than [she] bargained for.” From her article, published Tuesday:

“Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook ‘likes’, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened…the list goes on.”

The journalist recounts that as she looked through the data, she was “amazed by how much information [she] was voluntarily disclosing: from locations, interests and jobs, to pictures, music tastes and what [she] liked to eat.”

As to why the dating app would want to store so much of users’ personal data, Duportail notes that Tinder makes no effort to hide the fact that all account information — even private chats — is fair game when it comes to what to sell to advertisers.

“Personal data is the fuel of the economy,” Allesandro Acquesti, professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University, told Duportail. “Consumers’ data is being traded and transacted for the purpose of advertising.”

Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the activist who helped Duportail in her encounter with Tinder, says the journalist’s findings reflect a society shifting into one where an individual’s personal information — the advertising industry aside — can increasingly be used to affect his or her future:

“We are leaning towards a more and more opaque society, towards an even more intangible world where data collected about you will decide even larger facets of your life. Eventually, your whole existence will be affected.”

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The Equifax Hack Is The Most Disastrous Data Breach In History Because Now Hackers Have The Credit Information Of 143 Million Americans

This report was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse

Talk about a nightmare. It is being reported that criminals were able to hack into Equifax and make off with the credit information of 143 million Americans. We are talking about names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses and even driver’s license numbers. If this data breach was an earthquake, we would be talking about a magnitude-10.0 on the identity theft scale. We have never seen anything like this before, and to say that this will be “disastrous” for the credit industry would be a massive understatement.

What really disturbed me about this story is that this hack reportedly occurred between “mid-May and July of this year”…

Credit monitoring company Equifax has been hit by a high-tech heist that exposed the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information about 143 million Americans. Now the unwitting victims have to worry about the threat of having their identities stolen.

The Atlanta-based company, one of three major U.S. credit bureaus, said Thursday that “criminals” exploited a U.S. website application to access files between mid-May and July of this year.

So why didn’t we learn about this until September?

Somebody out there really needs to answer that question for us.

And even though the “143 million” number is being thrown around constantly, according to USA Today we may never know the true number of victims…

When asked if there’s a way to quantify how many people have been harmed, John Ulzheimer, a credit expert and former employee at Equifax and credit score firm FICO, said: “There’s no way to know, and there may never be a way to know.”

Personally, I don’t see how Equifax can possibly survive after this. Their stock price is already crashing, and now it has come out that they had put a “music major” in charge of data security…

When Congress hauls in Equifax CEO Richard Smith to grill him, it can start by asking why he put someone with degrees in music in charge of the company’s data security.

And then they might also ask him if anyone at the company has been involved in efforts to cover up Susan Mauldin’s lack of educational qualifications since the data breach became public.

It would be fascinating to hear Smith try to explain both of those extraordinary items.

Also, we are now finding out that Equifax has not just had security problems here in the United States.

According to the New York Post, data breaches have been taking place all over the globe…

Hackers had access to the names, dates of birth and e-mail addresses of nearly 400,000 people in the United Kingdom, said Equifax’s British subsidiary in a statement last week.

In Canada, sensitive data belonging to 10,000 consumers may have been hacked in the breach, said a statement from the Canadian Automobile Association.

In Argentina, one of the company’s portals was so easily accessible that it allowed quick exposure to the personal information of more than 14,000 people.

As noted above, the public didn’t learn about any of this until September.

But once top Equifax officials learned what had happened, some of them started dumping their shares of Equifax very rapidly…

Three Equifax executives — not the ones who are departing — sold shares worth a combined $1.8 million just a few days after the company discovered the breach, according to documents filed with securities regulators.

Equifax shares have lost a third of their value since it announced the breach.

Needless to say, the SEC is going to be looking into this very closely.

As we move forward, there is a tremendous amount of concern as to how much this data breach will affect the U.S. economy.

Only time will tell, but without a doubt it will have an impact. For example, according to Bloomberg this data breach could potentially have an absolutely disastrous impact on store-branded credit cards…

Equifax Inc.’s massive data breach could make an already tough market outlook even more daunting for the firms behind Gap Inc.’s and Ann Taylor’s store-branded credit cards.

Those retailers’ banking partners, including Synchrony Financial and Alliance Data Systems Corp., could see fewer account originations as more consumers freeze their credit to avoid hack-related fraud. Consumers have to take extra steps — including calling the credit bureau, going online or paying fees — to lift a block and get a new card.

“If people are defaulting to credit freezes, then if you’re a Macy’s retailer trying to sell credit cards, you can’t get that done at the point of sale,” said Vincent Caintic, an analyst at Stephens Inc. “It could become a regular thing, these freezes. It does slow down the origination process and it’s probably going to increase acquisition costs.”

If you believe that your data may have been compromised in this breach, there are some things that you can do right away to help protect against identity theft. You can sign up for 24 hour a day credit monitoring, you can request fraud alerts, you can enable “two factor authentication” and beyond all of that you could go as far as to freeze your credit.

But if everybody in America suddenly started freezing their credit, that would slow down economic activity dramatically. So needless to say authorities are hoping that does not happen.

In this case, Equifax needs to step up and do the right thing. They need to inform all of the victims (even if that means reaching out to 143 million different people), and they should automatically provide free credit monitoring for all of those that were affected.

I seriously doubt that Equifax will take these measures, and I also seriously doubt that Equifax will be able to survive much longer.

When you bungle something as badly as Equifax has done, it is nearly impossible to restore faith in an organization. The credit information of 143 million Americans is now in the hands of criminals, and the potential damage that could be done is absolutely off the charts.

Google Is About to Start Tracking Your Offline Behavior, Too

(ANTIMEDIA) It’s no secret that Google already monitors its users’ online shopping activity, but now it will follow them out of their homes and keep a close eye on every interaction they make. The tech giant announced a new system to track users’ in-store credit card purchases Tuesday in a statement published on the company’s official blog.

Google rolled out the new tool at Google Marketing Next, an annual event geared toward advertisers where the company unveils its newest innovations in marketing. “Store sales management” works by pulling data from Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit card transactions in the United States. The system then streamlines user information in order to generate reports automatically sent to merchants who opt in. The reports will measure the effectiveness of online advertisements by matching in-store transactions back to Google ads.

According to the Associated Press:

“Google says its computers rely primarily on log-in information, such as email addresses, to identify the people clicking on ads. It then matches that data with other identifying information compiled by merchants and the issuers of credit and debit cards to figure out when digital ads contribute to an offline purchase.”

This is ultimately an upgraded version of Google’s “store visits measurement,” which was rolled out in 2014 and updated in March 2017. This tool utilizes deep learning technology to analyze vast amounts of user data, including email addresses, ad clicks, browser and location history, and user surveys.

Miro Copic, a marketing professor at San Diego State University, told the Associated Press that “the privacy implications of this are pretty massive, so Google needs to tread very carefully.”

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