Tag Privacy
Your Privacy Does Not Matter
I have been away for a long time now. As with my growth journey, I have been experimenting with ways to work with my screen addiction. This took some effort. Using the screen less also meant that I limited my online communication. One of the motivating factors was how this would positively affect my privacy.
How to Pick Privacy-friendly Services
The topic of privacy came up today in a conversation about picking a cloud storage for documents like journals and other writing. Given the fact that services can recognise handwriting, where is a good place to store your notes?
The larger question was, how do you pick privacy-friendly services?
Let us start simple: Google owns Google Drive, Microsoft owns Microsoft OneDrive. They are both into advertising, though Microsoft is not as aggressive as Google is. Dropbox is solely a cloud storage company, with no known ties with the advertising world. Dropbox scores better here. Despite Dropbox’s security issues, Dropbox Security Bug Made Passwords Optional For Four Hours (TechCrunch) I have found it reliable. The drawback is that you start with a meagre 2 GB of storage. Sure, if you plan to store text documents and not much more, 2 GB is not bad; if you plan to store scanned documents, pictures, etc., you must look elsewhere.
The console Google does not want you to use
Facebook was a target at the beginning of this year, when they decided to tweak their privacy policy. It turned out to be a disastrous PR move. Although they reversed it, we are already seeing a better-worded version of the update. I wrote a couple of posts: one about how the change affects your privacy, and another, about whether WhatsApp chats are at all private.
Are WhatsApp chats private
On the 13th of January, WhatsApp put out a tweet in which they said they wanted to make something “100% clear”. The post said what WhatsApp does not or cannot do:
Privacy and You
Online privacy is like civilisation. It takes time, but when it happens, it happens. The process is slow and arduous. While we do not push ourselves to such drastic changes, some events do push us. One such was that of Facebook deciding to force WhatsApp users to allow sharing data between WhatsApp and Facebook.
Better Online Privacy (Part Two)
In the previous post, we saw what we mean by privacy, why it matters, and why we say privacy is a myth in today’s world of connected services. We also looked at what methods companies use to track us online. We saw that the conventional methods of protecting our privacy online does not work in cases such as Google and Facebook. In this post, we look at how to handle tracking by large corporations.
Better Online Privacy (Part One)
Privacy is a myth. We have all heard that. Some of us agree, some disagree, most could not care less. The most common response I have gotten to statements about privacy is “Well, not like I have anything to hide.” Yes, you probably do not. But would you be comfortable if your Uber driver or your personal banker could tell the brand of the inners you wear? Yes, we all wear them, they make them in a small set of colours, and a specific set of models, but yet, it makes you uncomfortable—even for a second—when someone points out what you are wearing, even as a guess—unless you’re purposefully showing it as a statement (don’t mean to judge). That, my friend, is our sense of privacy.