Information leaks happen all of the time. Consider the Equifax data breach in September 2017 that exposed 148 million Americans; That is half of the US population, which means it’s likely that those who weren’t exposed were children who have no credit history at all — to a service you’ve never even consented to.
Aside from this major financial digital leak, there are considerable leaks that happen all the time that go mostly unsung to the average person, with some of them never even being reported at all.
Many of these originate from social media platforms and the data we willingly enter into them, expecting some level of security.
However, you should expect no absolute security nor privacy for anything put on the internet, or any sort of “cloud” (which is just a flowery name for the computer of somebody else).
The latest, massive breach has targeted the largest behemoth of them all, Facebook:
The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.
However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising.
In short, this means you should refrain from taking tests which ask, “What celebrity do I think like?” or “What color slime would my spirit be?” Buzzfeed is a particularly nefarious offender.
My recommendation is to never sign into anything except Facebook with your Facebook credentials, and to use ad blockers (like uBlock Origin) and cookie destroyers (Cookie AutoDelete or Self-Destructing Cookies) to cut down on the ability to be tracked online.
If you’re curious to know where your data may have been compromised elsewhere, you can check out “have i been pwned?“ and enter your e-mail address to see which services your information has been leaked from.
None of these, short of ridding yourself of Facebook and social media accounts entirely is going to prevent these things from happening, but you can mitigate the severity of your online footprint by taking proactive measures to lock your computer down.
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