Private data, public life

Anurag Chakraborty

“They trust me — dumb f***s.”

— Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, circa. 2003.

In a 2010 profile by the New Yorker, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that he had mocked early Facebook users, about 4,000 lab rats from his university, for trusting him with their personal information. “Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses…,” the 19-year-old Zuckerberg had bragged to one of his friends on an instant messaging platform. “They trust me — dumb f***s,” he added.

That quote perhaps truly does not reflect the Mark Zuckerberg of today. Today, he is the man who makes much more impressive statements like how the age of privacy is over and how it is the new normal to share everything about your life with everyone you don’t know.

And even though his original, famous quote was swiftly followed with a statement on the lines of how it was a youthful indiscretion and he was much more mature now, seven years later, at the ripe age of 26 – the slightly disconcerting take sure reflects very accurately about how companies online take your privacy. The logic is if you enjoy a free service, you have no right to your data. Sound!

What

In the digital lives we live — from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history, the personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic arteries of the network.

And while our daily lives have upgraded to the 21st century, the law hasn’t kept pace. To date, few governments around the world have managed to update archaic communication privacy laws to acknowledge that the wholesale collection of data has vastly different ramifications than they once did in the 18th century.

In fact, if anything, governments all over count on these lax provisions so that all the data we generate online can be stored, indexed, analysed and used for their intelligence. Our world may not look very Orwellian on the outside but on the inside, ‘thoughtcrime’ is a reality.  

This is what data privacy is all about. It’s your right to your data – protected from advertisers, governments and all other pervasive forces. And this is what organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Privacy International are trying to defend.

Why

Imagine a world where you are constantly being judged. Would you like it? And while you may think you have nothing to hide (Really?), think about this. None of the freedom and progress we’ve won over the past century would have been possible without the freedom to change things that privacy gives us.

If we all had the fear of suffering immediately, or years down the road, for anything we did or said that was unusual, unpopular, or against the rules, social and economic progress would grind to a halt, because everyone would afraid to rock the boat. And that is at the core of why privacy is important and why you should care.

When the Edward Snowden leaks revealed just how deep reaching and perverse the American government’s surveillance was on its own people, there was a huge brouhaha around the globe. Snowden’s revelations showed how NSA was storing huge swathes of data about American citizens – down to illegally recording their phone conversations – and the using it against them when they saw convenient. 

Sitting across oceans in the comfort of our hot, humid third-world country many of us are inclined to think that we are beyond the ambit of these high-tech violations, but we would only be terribly wrong. 

Reports say some Rs 400 crore of us taxpayers’ money (could be double that amount according to some media reports) has been used to set up the Central Monitoring System (CMS) – a one-window tunnel to process all data, communications flowing within, out of and inside the borders of our secular, pluralistic democracy.

There. Pop goes the bubble, doesn’t it? In this climate, we increasingly look to technology companies themselves to have the strongest possible policies when it comes to protecting user rights. 

Who

For four years, organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation documented the practices of major internet companies and service providers, judging their publicly available policies, and highlighting best practices. 

But times have changed, and now we should expect more. We should look to companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon to be transparent about the types of content that is blocked or censored in response to government requests, as well as what deleted data is kept around in case government agents seek it in the future. 

There should also be a more pressing call to these companies to take a principled stance against government-mandated backdoors.

According to the 2015 EFF report ‘Who Has Your Back’, nine companies earned stars in every category that was available to them. These included Adobe, Apple, Dropbox, Sonic, Wickr, Wikimedia, Wordpress.com, and Yahoo. Google and Microsoft, both scored three, while WhatsApp fared as bad some a few American telcos who scored one star. 

How

Covering your steps and safeguarding your privacy online is a multi-step process and there is no end to how much you can do. From simply installing an extension on your browser to using a Linux operating system tailor-made for secrecy, every step only adds just another layer of security.

To start from the top, install a few extensions or addons on your browser that stop websites from showing you intrusive, annoying ads, stop Facebook, Twitter and social media tracking on EVERY website you visit and stop the overall collection of profiling data on your online activities. 

Go to the extension or addon gallery of your browser (Opera, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc) and get the uBlock, Disconnect.me and Ghostery plugins. We also recommend you get the Web of Trust or WoT extension to see community generated safety, security and privacy rankings of websites you visit.

Next, get a custom firewall for your OS. On Windows we recommend Windows 7 Firewall Control. This lightweight tool, not exclusive to Windows 7, lets you set rules which apps are allowed to access the Internet. Block all apps that you don’t need the Internet for. A firewall also protects you from illicit incoming connections.

Next, if you are doing something really cool, use the Tor browser. Tor stands for The Onion Router and is a global alliance that reroutes everybody’s browsing traffic from everywhere, making it really, really difficult to track who is browsing what. If that’s too much trouble, using the incognito mode and preferring only HTTPS websites is a good first step.

If you are really daring, use a Linux distribution such as the Edward Snowden-recommended Tails OS. Besides making you feel like a cyber-ninja, this operating system that can be run from a USB drive, uses state-of-the-art cryptographic tools and lets you use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship among other things.

In a voyeuristic money-spinning world, privacy is a difficult goal and certainly not free or easy. But if you start off with these handy steps and then escalate your research, it is quite possible to leave the villains biting the dust.