We have certainly looked at personal information, privacy, and managing your digital footprint before, but with AI now firmly integrated into much of what we do, it’s worth looking at again. We are also reaching the point where college and university graduates have spent their entire lives online and being documented online and now they have to grapple with that reality as they look for work, get housing, and get into long term relationships. But it’s still worth looking at how your personal information is used online even if you’re younger or older. And it’s worth looking at just how integrated the internet is in our normal, every day lives and what sort of data they are collecting.
Take stock of your house. What do you have that you don’t even think about anymore, but collects information on you? Phone? Computer? Smartwatch? Fitness tracker? SmartTV? Smart Fridge? (I always think those look a bit silly to be honest, but also kind of neat?) How many website are you logged into? How many subscriptions do you have? How many memberships?
All of these things collect a lot of data on you and that data is valuable to companies, corporations and even governments. They collect data on how best to sell things to you, ways to market politics to you, and ways to get you involved in things that benefits broader companies. Sometimes these things are beneficial – if you’re going to get advertised to anyway, it might as well be ads that actually have some meaning for you – but most of the time, it feels pretty intrusive. It has also been tied to data breaches that lead to loss of money, reputation, and credit scores, as well as influencing elections. Employers look at as much information as they can on you before deciding whether or not to hire you, including social media posts and what pops up on search engines. Some even get you to tell ChatGPT or other systems to tell them about you!
And even if you managed to make yourself invisible online, that is still seen as suspicious as it looks like you have something serious to hide.
So, what can you do about managing your digital footprint, given that you don’t want to give too much information, but you also don’t really want to give none.
Curating Yourself
It’s pretty impossible to completely erase your digital footprint nowadays with more jobs posted online, more social networking and more subscription services. But you can curate that footprint. Curating simply means be mindful about what you are doing and how you do it. This is always a good idea as you want to make sure that you are putting out information that you actually want to put out and not just anything and everything!
Remember way back when, we talked about story telling in your interview and how it can be used to support the skills and experience you want to showcase. Well, you do something similar to social media and other website – you want to build the story of you in a way that is mindful. You don’t need to be visible everywhere, nor do you need (nor should you) share everything going on in your life. Instead, you only want to share things that are beneficial to you in some way without giving away too much.
When you’re posting online, consider the following:
- What would a stranger think about what I posted?
- What information am I accidentally giving away? (home address? Workplace information? Etc)
- What would an employer think about what I post?
- What story am I telling with my posts?
- What would I think of this post a year from now?
This is a good way to start practicing curating your online messaging.
Information For Access
Information about you is a big business. TikTok has been collecting sensitive information about almost 200 million users in North America alone since 2020. Game apps and dating apps are an easy way to get information about your location and your preferences. And of course, more and more people store information ‘on the cloud’ (either by choice or design on the part of the system) which are rich with information for any hacker to grab. Your smartwatch doesn’t just track your steps – it can track your heart rate, sleep patterns, and even when you had sex (at least a fair estimate). AI scans your emails to help you compose new messages, AI summarizes messages from Facebook and police have used data to track people who might have ties to criminals, even if they are benign ones. Information about you is what you are trading for access to social media apps, but you can decide how much goes into the transaction.
These systems are far from impregnable, so it’s almost common place to hear about data breaches, hacking, and phishing. Being mindful of what you put online and how to answer messages from strangers isn’t just a good idea for putting forth your best face, it’s the best way to make sure that you don’t become a victim of cybercrimes.
Is Privacy a Right or a Privilege?
Privacy concerns are pretty common; recent polling on the use of AI found that 85% of Canadians have privacy concerns which is far more than simply assuming that people are paranoid! With AI generated content, deepfake videos, and a lot of news about hacking and phishing scams, it’s no wonder that people are uncertain about what they are seeing online and even more careful about what they share, how they share it and with whom.
In 1984, the UN included the right to privacy in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but what does privacy actually mean? It’s a highly subjective topic – one person’s strongly held belief isn’t going to match someone else’s. Someone may be perfectly fine sharing every last detail of their life while other people are locked vaults and share the bare minimum to avoid being called a creep or weird. And of course, most of us lie somewhere between those two extremes, more or less willing to share more or fewer things. But of course, most of us want to know every last thing about some people while safeguarding everything we can about ourselves! It’s somewhat hypocritical really, but at the same time it shows our very human need to connect with others.
Governments are still grappling with what it means to juggle privacy with the importance of accessing and disseminating information and how that should look. And with technology move far faster than laws, it just gets murkier every year. That means it’s important to do what you can to protect at least the core information about you, your family, and your home and be aware of common phishing scams and what attempts to get your information look like.
So is this the end of privacy as we know it? Sort of – it’s certainly different from even fifty years ago when most communities felt tighter and other places felt farther away. But at the same time, there are plenty of tools to help safeguard your information, as well as using your own common sense and knowledge. Be mindful when you’re posting online and make sure that it’s information that is useful to you and useless to hackers.
