Privacy in the Modern Era
In today's fast paced world, its hard to allocate an hour to read over the legalese in a new phone or Internet contract. Here in the USA most customers don't understand that they are granting permission to the carriers to sell their data use patterns. Sure the data doesn't have their name, street address or items of that detail however, it does contain metadata (Data about the Data) that Machine Learning (ML) firms pool together and then leverage analytics processes against to understand commonalities of that data. That data is then in turn sold to Wall Street firms and Advertising firms to create specific campaigns which target patterns they feel best suited to their use cases. One example, of this a few years back when Tesla was ramping up production staff for their "S" model, the cell phone data was collected from the Tesla properties and analyzed to quickly see the staff was 2-3x larger than it was just weeks prior. This was a huge win for the Analytics firms... and you get the drift.
Knowing that your cell phone is typically always with-in six (6) feet of your person it becomes like a personal tracker. How can you have fun with the statistics? You could head fake them and leave your phone in the living room at night so they think you are now sleeping on the couch! Leave the phone at home when you run to the store (so they don't know where you are at all times). You could turn off location services to apps that don't require it and example is why does Calendar need to know where you are? Other than the obvious if you cross time zones, the Time change feature handles that well enough. Do you really want Social Media to know everything about you? Recall you are the platform already, turn it off and on only when you need it. I know its a royal pain to not be able to post immediately (okay drama queen it takes less than a second to turn it back on).
How to protect what is yours in the new modern era?
Let me know what steps you take.
Trust but verify!
