Why Should People Care About Data Privacy?
Data privacy may not be the first thing many people think about in their everyday lives. So what if Google, Instagram, ChatGPT, or other services we use collects data? Maybe sometimes these tools will offer personalized recommendations and ads to save time, which won’t hurt.
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It’s natural to think that for people who don’t do anything criminal, data privacy is not a big concern. However, the matter goes beyond that.
Stories When Private Data Collection Caused Trouble
It’s not rare for tech companies to make headlines for their questionable use of people's data. This is true for internet browsers, social media platforms, and different apps. People can be wrongfully banned, tracked without their consent, and manipulated by ads.
In 2022, Mark, a father from San Francisco was banned by Google for sending a doctor a photo of his son’s groin for examination. The photo was automatically saved on Google Photos, too. Without understanding the context of the image, Google flagged it as child sexual abuse material and alerted the police, which started an investigation. The company banned Mark’s Google accounts, including Gmail and Google Fi, for severe violations. He lost his email, contacts, photos, and other accounts linked to Google. Mark requested that Google restore his account, but even after the police found that he hadn’t committed any crime, the company refused to restore it. From Google’s perspective, they did what the company policy and federal law required them to do by identifying the image and removing the account from Google’s platforms.
Amazon, another big tech company, caused data privacy concerns with its doorbell camera Ring and voice assistant Alexa. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission claimed in a 2023 lawsuit that Ring employees and contractors had full access to customers’ home videos for years and could use the recordings to train algorithms without users’ consent. According to the filing, in 2017, a Ring employee viewed videos of at least 81 female customers and was terminated when a co-worker noticed the violation. The case was settled with Amazon agreeing to pay $5.8 million to refund customers.
And in a complaint against Alexa, the FTC claimed that the voice assistant violated children’s privacy laws. Despite saying it deletes recordings, Alexa kept them longer than necessary to train the algorithms to understand children. To settle the allegations, Amazon agreed to pay $25 million.
Social media platforms are another place where users' rights to data privacy can be violated. Facebook's parent company, Meta, has faced multiple lawsuits regarding privacy issues. In a case resolved in 2022, users complained that the platform tracked their location without consent, even after they had disabled the service. More recently, in July 2024, Meta agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle claims of violating the privacy rights of Texas residents by selling their biometric data, including facial scans and fingerprints. Earlier, in 2021, Facebook shut down its facial recognition system and removed the biometric data of over 1 billion users.
The popular AI application ChatGPT hasn’t bypassed accusations either. In January 2024, Italy’s data protection authority, Garante, sent OpenAI a notice of breaches of EU rules. Previously, in March 2023, the regulator launched a probe against OpenAI and temporarily banned ChatGPT in Italy. Garante accused OpenAI of exposing users’ messages and private information while questioning whether there is a legal basis for the app to collect massive amounts of data.
These are just a few examples showing that data privacy violations can impact our lives in various ways. Anyone can face unexpected bans, use devices that share their data with company employees, be hacked, or provide personal information to a company without knowing how it will be used.
Is There Something You Can Do to Protect Your Data?
Saying it’s possible to fully protect your online data privacy would be unrealistic (at least for now). However, we can be more cautious when using the internet, hitting “agree,” and entering information on different websites without weighing the risks. It’s important to know that a service may seem private but still collects information. For example, Google Incognito, the private mode of the popular browser, still collects user data.In 2020, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Google, accusing the company of collecting data even when users were browsing in private mode. According to the suit, despite Incognito allowing users to turn off data collection, other Google tools, like advertising technology, continued to monitor activity.
In April 2024, the case was settled, with the company agreeing to delete billions of records and to allow Incognito mode users to block third-party cookies for the next five years. After the settlement, Google made changes to its Incognito description, highlighting that the visited websites and the services they use can collect data. As you can’t rely on Incognito for complete privacy, consider checking out privacy-focused internet browsers like DuckDuckGo and Brave.
To protect your data, consider turning off the settings you don’t need at the moment, like location, microphone, and camera access. And, don’t automatically install new apps and buy gadgets without checking how valid and secure they are.
You can consider switching to apps that use blockchain as a core technology to store and process data. Thus, you’ll own your data and you will be able to authorize its use.
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