Hello folks, welcome to the fresh article on privacy. This is based on my personal experience and I will try to give you in depth details of how tech giants have embedded their product into our day-to-day life, how it affects your privacy and how to stop them(partially!!).
TL;DR
Internet giants knows more about you than you do. Dot.
Before we start, let me clear some points:
- 21st century is digital century. Digital data is like money, so every company wants to collect more and more data about you.
- I am aware that, for normal user, it is very very difficult to prevent tech giant from tracking them. This is sad, but it’s reality.
- Nothing is perfect. Things I’ll describe here won’t do magic for your privacy; but it will surely help you to increase your privacy.
- All are my personal views. I am not affiliated with any of the brands or company i mentioned here.
So, without further ado, let’s start journey.
21st Century is digital century where data is very precious thing. Every giant company wants to collect as much as possible data about you. Sometimes they collect data to provide personalized stuff, but most of times they collect to provide targeted ads, sell your data to third party to make money, get some insight from it etc. Some companies even try to manipulate your mindset by showing you the content that they think best suite to you. Remember, privacy is not about just hiding your Profile Picture or posts, it’s about your personal data that belongs to you.
Privacy is not a feature, it’s a human right.
In this article, we will explore how much data they have about you and how you can stop them to collect the data about you. So let’s start with one by one tech giants.
Google has embedded it’s product in day-to-day life so deeply that one simply can’t live without it. You need browser to surf internet, google has chrome for you. You need mail for personal or professional use, google has gmail for you. You need some cloud space, google has Google Drive for you. You need a good photo app, google has Google Photos for you. These are just few examples. Google has lot more to offer to make one’s life easier than ever. But as one wise man said; nothing is free on internet, if something is free, then you are the product. This fact is also applied to google services. Google is biggest ad network manager in world. Google uses your personal data to suggest you more and more personalized ads. Additionally, google has most advanced Machine Learning technology throughout silicon valley. They use it to dig deeply into your data and create personalized profile for you. If you have google account, Google knows more about you than you do. But how much they know about you ? Let’s dig out :
- They have your name, mobile number,address, contacts, payment info (Information provided by you).
- They know what you order through online shopping, where you travelling, where you were in last few days or months (private map), what you search on internet (for most people, there is nothing like search engine, it’s just google), what you watch on internet (YouTube).
- Do you exactly remember which apps you had used 2 days ago ? Google knows it for sure. It accurately knows when did you opened WhatsApp last night, or when did you interacted with your home screen (yes, they log it too). Don’t believe it ? Check out your activity on Google : https://myactivity.google.com./myactivity
How it feels when you realize someone is constantly watching you physically ? Irritating right ? google is doing the same but digitally. It watching you for every seconds and keep track of it. So, how you can avoid this ? Is there any way to keep google’s prying eyes away from you while you can still use google services? Yes, there is.
Go to your account settings : https://myaccount.google.com/
Select Data & personalization tab, scroll down to Activity Control.
You can see 6 activity is ON for you by default. You can turn all of them, but 3 of them is interesting to know.
- Web and App Activity: This is the things that let google know about every second of your digital life. For example, when did you opened certain app on your device. Turn it off, so google will not log it.
- Location History: Have you experienced that when you visit any known place (park, monument etc) and after few hours, there comes one pop-up from google map stating that let people help understand this place better with few questions ? it’s because of google is tracking your location even if you don’t use their products. Turn it off so you can live in some peace!!!
- Voice and Audio Activity: Google records every voice sample that you use to talk with your google assistant. You can turn off this permission to avoid this.
Additionally, if you are looking for alternative to google products, please have a look at : https://nomoregoogle.com/
Amazon
You must be thinking, how a online shopping company can affect my privacy? Beware, amazon is lot more than an online shopping company. It’s true power lies behind it’s massive Cloud network known as Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is world’s most used cloud network. It is possible that your favorite app or website is hosted on AWS. So when you use it, you are passively interacting with Amazon. Amazon is also tracking you online but it doesn’t provide options like google to turn it off.
Even after those messy scandals, are you still using Facebook ? Come on. you should stop it if you care even 1% about your privacy. Facebook is known as the evil company on internet. It has second largest ad network after google. As revealed by Facebook engineer in interview process, Facebook uses 1,28,000 features (different information related to you) to train their machine learning models for ad personalization. This is INSANE. Recently, Facebook's involvement in more and more scandals make them very questionable.
Microsoft
Microsoft is also collecting lots of data about it’s user, but it’s less compared to above three company. Microsoft is not into ads business.
To control your privacy related settings, go to https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/ and turn off settings that you would like to prevent Microsoft from collecting data about it. Additionally, go to Activity History tab and clear all previous data.
Apple
Apple is the one that collects least data about users. They are not angels, but comparatively they don’t depends on user data. They have good (expensive!!) products to run company. So you can say apple is good for data privacy amongst these companies. (Remember, this is not applicable to Android and iOS. Both OS provide good privacy features).
If you think that they only track you when you use their products, you may be wrong. Whenever you interact with IP address (address associated with every device (or website) to uniquely identify them) belongs to them, you are interacting with them. Below is the image that show how many of IP they own
https://gizmodo.com/life-without-the-tech-giants-1830258056
If you are pro user and want more privacy comapared to regular user, I got you covered. Below is the tips that will be helpful to maintain your privacy.
- Get some good VPN that DOESN’T keep log of your browsing activity.
- Use containers and trackers in Mozilla Firefox browser.
- Use TOR browser to surf anonymously.
It’s very difficult to avoid them completely. But with some effort, at least you can prevent them to keep eye on you constantly. That will help you to live freely with some peace.
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