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Privacy Matters

It’s time to take your privacy back.

Privacy. Is there really such a thing anymore in the age of surveillance capitalism, smartphones and social media? How concerned should you be about what’s going on with technology and data? What can you do to protect your own personal privacy?

10,000

Data points on you that are bought and sold by data trackers without your knowledge *

689,003

Facebook users secretly manipulated in “emotional contagion” experiment **

What data is collected about you?

If you’re an average American, you check your phone every 12 minutes. But the average app is checking the phone for that average American’s data every second.

Data is big business. U.S. companies alone spent an estimated $19+ billion in 2018 acquiring and analyzing consumer data. And the amount of data that’s readily available on the average American is staggering.

The amount of personal data being collected on individuals is increasing at an astonishing rate: “In 2017, data giant Acxiom provided up to 3,000 attributes on 700 million people. In 2018, the number was 10,000, on 2.5 billion consumers.”

200 trillion

Number of predictions of user behavior per day by Facebook’s AI framework ***

Is collecting personal data legal?

Mass surveillance. The U.S. government is doing it. We know that. Your every online move, call, text, purchase, and picture is collected, searched, then stored potentially forever in massive databases. Does that make it legal?

Companies are doing it too. Not to mention foreign governments. All these juicy databases are big fat targets for hackers, and social media provides the perfect way in. One in five organizations worldwide has been infected by malware distributed through social media.

Who’s responsible for your data, and where are the legal limits and accountabilities in all of this? Well, the laws are different everywhere, and yet the Internet knows no borders.