For decades, the landline was your family’s main social connection with the outside world. People consented to have their names, street addresses, and phone numbers published in an annual book that was not only freely available but was actually delivered to every residence in town. Some of us even paid for the privilege to have our entries excluded from that book. Over the years, sales calls at dinner time led to a National Do Not Call registry and a general dislike for unsolicited contact.
Fast forward to 2020. Few of us still own landlines, fewer rely on them for their primary connection. Rather than a giant phone book, listing the names and addresses of anyone we may need to reach out and touch, we trust our contact lists to Google, to Apple, to Samsung, and to Amazon. Think about that – we used to pay an extra fee each month to keep our information private, but, today, anyone who has saved your phone number is sharing it, along with any other contact information they care to save for you, and exporting it to giant corporations who earn profit by collecting, storing, collating, dissecting, and analyzing every detail about you.
After all, you are their product.
Data privacy in 2020 is mostly an illusion. We have dozens of token options to opt out of data collection, but we don’t think about the broader implications – an astounding number of the digital or connected products that we consume are not actually the product – we are, and we don’t really consider the implications.
As a society, our complacency on data privacy is based on our faith in institutions – big corporations, big government, and we assume that our rights are protected while we blithely ignore the contents of license agreements and the fine text of obscurely written government regulations, churned out a ton at a time by a faceless army of thousands in government bureaucracies.
Don’t disregard the ability of bad actors to confiscate your data without any help from government or the giant corporations. How often have you personally, or someone you know, been affected by a data breach?
For smart home systems, is there a required Cloud component? Cloud services occasionally fail, companies can go out of business, and you can have prolonged Internet outages, any one of which can make your clever smart home device an expensive paperweight. They’re also an excellent source of information about you.
What time do you go to work? Come home? How late do you stay awake at night? Do you run your air conditioner a little too cool compared to your neighbors? What kind of music do you like? What do your children like to listen to? Does your Cloud company maintain an ecommerce site? If you order products there, is the payment or shipping data collated with your usage?
Is this data that ANYBODY deserves to collect about you and your family?
There are important precautions you should always take to proactively limit the ability of corporations, government, and criminals to harvest your data – or to minimize the damage when information about you is shared or sold against your will.
First – whenever possible, only do business with GDPR-compliant companies. A significant number of US corporations do business in Europe and must comply – maintaining separate systems is normally more trouble than its worth, so you’ve got a great chance of working with a service that adheres to Europe’s more stringent rules. Eventually, the US will have laws as protective of its citizens, but aren’t there always loopholes?
Second – always, ALWAYS provide the absolute minimum amount of information required to use a given service or product. Stop and think about it – is the product you’re using worth the sum of information that you’re passing along? Is there a competitive product or service that requires less?
Third – use only the most private Cloud services – if a company doesn’t offer local control, you need to REALLY evaluate the value of that service. Great companies provide anonymous Cloud services, so that your data remains yours. Period. The VERY best companies allow customers to completely control their products without relying on a remote server.
Fourth – minimize the damage. The best tactic you can use is email forwards. This fights everything from spam to hackers, to data collation.
For less than $10 per year, register a web domain with a company like www.namecheap.com with “Whoisguard,” assuring you of an anonymous domain registration. Combine that with CPANEL hosting from a company like www.hostmedia.co.uk – which allows you to host your domain for less than $20 annually.
This strategy allows you to create forwarding email addresses, using your anonymous domain, which will then forward to any email address you chose. Set up a dedicated forward for every company that you do business with.
Benefits:
- Identify which companies send SPAM email or sell your email address and stop doing business with them.
- Reduce the amount of data that can be collated about you from email addresses.
- Minimize the number of additional accounts compromised from any data breach.
Until we apply economic and social force to corporations, until we cause our legislators to fear, we’ll never eliminate the collection of some data that we’d prefer to keep private. That doesn’t mean, however, that we have to be easy targets. Make them work as hard as possible to turn you into their product.
For your smart home products, do you want to find a company that ticks all of the items on this list, including full GDPR compliance, allowing you to create an account with only an anonymous email and your password, and the ability to opt in or out of a completely anonymous free Cloud service?
I happen to know one very well, because I work there – www.shelly.cloud allows you to be the consumer, not the product.