Table of Contents
The Future of Internet Privacy: How to Protect Yourself in a Data-Driven World
Data Privacy Laws and Regulations
How the Internet is Becoming More Data-Driven?
How and Why is Data Collected?
Practical Steps to Protect Your Privacy
The Future of Internet Privacy: How to Protect Yourself in a Data-Driven World
You need to learn how to stay protected in the data-driven world of today. Why? Because with every online innovation comes a new threat to privacy. Statistics show that more than 290 million people have been victims of privacy breaches, which is quite alarming.
Almost every application, website, forum, etc, requires you to sign up and share personal information. That’s why there’s a dire need to protect your online experience, especially in today’s world where everything is connected via online data.
Fortunately, this blog will cover the major ways of protecting yourself online while taking necessary steps to avoid privacy exploitation and breaches. So, let’s dive deeper into it:
State of Internet Privacy
Data breaches have been occurring since the advent of the internet. In 2002, more than 250, 000 social security numbers were stolen from one of the data centers of the State of California.
The National Public Data (NPD) reported a breach most recently, stating that a dataset containing social security numbers of more than 2.8 billion people was leaked on the dark web.
Personal information of more than 530 million Facebook users was leaked on a hacking forum back in 2021. AT&T, one of the leading internet companies in the US, had more than 110 million user data stolen by hackers in 2024.
More than 49 million user data stored by Dell was compromised this year. All these stats are alarming enough to push all internet users towards implementing high-end security. The major causes identified for these breaches included:
Data Brokers
As evident from the name, data brokers are personnel or entities that deal with sharing, buying, or selling data. A data broker can be an individual or a company that collects user information from different sources i.e., online accounts, cookies, cache, etc.
This can be done legally i.e., for surveys, census, public recording, etc., or illegally through social networking sites, hacking, etc. Either way, a data broker can sell or share the information collected to sources as they like.
However, a data broker must abide by the data sharing and using regulations that restrict the sharing of personal information by illegal means of any kind. In most data breaches, hackers attempt to steal information from such data brokers, and then sell them to the highest bidders.
Data Privacy Laws and Regulations
120 countries have formulated data privacy laws and regulations, and each country has its own set of regulations. Some of the famous laws are given below:
- California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA)
- Colorado’s Privacy Act (CPA)
- China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL)
- China’s Cybersecurity Law (CSL)
- Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA)
- Swiss Revised Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP)
- Australian Privacy Act 1988
- Brasil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD)
- Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)
- Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI)
- New Zealand’s Privacy Act
- South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act 2012 (PIPA)
Each of these laws is designed to ensure that consumers have the right to control and access how their data is collected, used, and shared by individuals or organizations.
How the Internet is Becoming More Data-Driven?
The internet, as we know, collects data from almost every source available. From signing in your account to creating a playlist on Spotify, every user is sharing more than a chunk of data online.
This data is collected by organizations and platforms that want to tailor the online experience according to the tastes of the users. To understand this, let’s check out how is data collected:
How and Why is Data Collected?
The primary ways that most websites and platforms collect your data include:
Each platform uses one or more methods for collecting user information. Why?
- To provide a personalized experience to the users visiting these platforms.
- To show personalized information i.e., stories, topics, etc. recently visited by the users.
- To show ads related to the interests of the users.
- To store cache/ cookies to use for user inputs.
- To gather data for analytics.
Role of AI and ML
Since there’s an immense amount of data present online, individuals and organizations gathering it take help from AI and ML. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools embedded with Machine Learning (ML) can help make data collection seamless.
The algorithms designed will run checks as prescribed and collect data automatically with AI. In doing so, the ML algorithms will help AI tools learn as they operate, making the tools efficient enough to achieve accurate results.
The bottom line to collecting data is to provide personalized online experiences as much as possible. Hence, the internet is becoming data-driven; data will be the driving factor for businesses.
Practical Steps to Protect Your Privacy
With imminent threats to privacy and online data, it’s only evident to take precautionary measures and ensure protection. Here are some practical steps to take in this matter:
- Minimize Information Sharing
The less you share, the lesser the danger of anyone stealing it. From user information to financial details, contact information to photos, sharing less in your online world is the key to safekeeping your privacy.
Most of the time, we don’t even know what information we’re sharing that can lead to a breach. And with access to the latest tools, hackers use innovative methods to score a breach wherever they can.
- Use Strong Passwords
Ensuring that you’re using strong passwords for your accounts should be your top priority. In most cases, hackers use the ‘brute force attack’ to crack passwords. Although this technique can break any password, a complex password will take years to crack. Hence, always create complex passwords with:
- Alphanumeric combinations
- Special symbols
- 8 or more characters in length
While doing so, avoid adding birthdays, names, or anything that is commonly found in your profile information such as pet names, institute names, etc.
- Enable 2-Factor Authentication
2-factor authentication has been proven to be quite successful in terms of preventing privacy breaches. A report by Microsoft showed that 2FA was successful in preventing almost 99% of cyberattacks.
Hence, adding 2FA is one of the best and easiest ways of preventing any security and privacy breaches. You can easily add secondary accounts as well as your phone number that can receive alerts for authentication upon login.
- Lock Social Profiles
Keeping your social profile public can cause a breach of your privacy since your account details are exposed. By simply changing the privacy settings to ‘private’ or ‘lock,’ you can save your profile from stalkers who are looking to steal user info.
- Remove Unused Content & Tools
In most cases, you download an app, use it, and then forget about it. However, almost every app requires permission to access storage and device content. The same is the case with tools, such as video editors, image editors, etc.
If you’re not using such apps or tools, then you should remove them since they are accessing your device’s storage and the content stored on it. While accessing, these apps and tools collect the data from your device and share them with their centralized databases for repository on user preferences.
In any case, if the database is breached, your device’s information will be exposed too. Hence, only keep apps and tools that you’re regularly using and uninstall the idle ones.
- Reduce Permissions
One might think that keeping and allowing access to regularly used apps and tools can cause a breach too. It’s not wrong to think so since several breaches occur on databases holding data from regular users.
However, the one thing you can do to improve the security of your privacy from such apps and tools is to limit the permissions allowed to them. Most apps now list the option of ‘allow only when using the app’ option when asking for permissions.
In addition, make sure to go through the permissions that the app is asking for. Using the app, you can tell what ‘kind’ of permissions it needs. For instance, a video editing app should ask for permission to access the storage only, not the contacts.
- Clear History and Cache
If you’re a frequent visitor of any website where you’ve created an account and ‘accepted cookies’ upon visiting, then make sure to clear these later. This is to ensure that the hackers don’t access your information during a breach in the cookies stored on the website.
Yes, you’d need to input your account details again when visiting the website but it’s a small price to pay for securing your personal data and safeguarding privacy. Furthermore, you can disable access to harmful and malicious websites and apps while connected to your network.
Several Xfinity Internet deals, cme with features that allow users to limit access via App Lock options in parental controls. This can minimize instances of you or your family accidentally stumbling upon a malicious website.
- Install Pending Updates
Security updates are quite important since they remove any loopholes in the current security measures of your device. Installing pending updates can level up the protection game of your devices, mitigating any instances of security breaches.
Moreover, these updates also help uplift the performance of the device, which means you can get steady workability alongside protection.
- Beware of Scams
Phishing is one of the most common ways that hackers use to steal personal information, leading to security breaches. Even with Google’s efforts to block more than 99% of phishing attempts, 3.4 billion spam/ phishing emails are sent every day, resulting in more than 3 million victims worldwide.
So, the only thing to do is to stay vigilant of any such email coming into your inbox. Set up spam filters so that any such email is automatically pushed into the spam box. In addition, be wary of any email from ‘potential friends/ family’ illustrating ‘urgency’ and requiring ‘any kind of personal information’.
- Stay Informed
Lastly, ensure that you’re aware of any news related to hacking attempts or virus attacks going online. This would help mitigate any instance of you falling for any such attempt as well as warn others.
While these tips and tricks provide great defense against cyberattacks, it’s better to stay vigilant in today’s online world. Keeping your security software updated, sharing less information on social media, and keeping an eye on your connected accounts will help keep online attacks at bay.
