Part of Listed's 100 Day Writing Challenge.

Ever had a conversation with someone about a certain topic? Say about dogs, then suddenly your entire advertisement profile shows up dog related snacks? Creepy.

Happens to me too, recently was talking about planning an overseas trip to either Japan or China. When I opened my social media, guess what was recommeded to me? Places to visit, food locations and tourist hot-spots in China/Japan.

Today, I want to share about the reasons why I care about privacy, hopefully it can make convince you to care about it more.

Why I care about privacy

They are selling your data, and your not getting any profit

Companies are literally taking your data and selling it to data brokers for profit. Meanwhile you get asked to pay and subscribe to their services for better features.

Rather I myself sell my own data and get some profit off it.

Correlation to Security

Privacy may not be security, but it is related. The less data you share to your attackers, the less attack surface they can discover.

Every email or phone number that gets shared around is a contact point out there for phishing attacks. Each home address shared is a point of interest for potential robberies. Every detail about when you will be away from your house, what kind of valuables you have? Pretty enticing for bad actors.

You may guarantee that you aren't a person of interest, but can you say so in the future? The problem is that the data you shared stays there for a long time. Is the probability of being a victim of a malicious actor a 0% in the future?

When I was younger, one of my schoolmates shared and posted a lot of her photos on social media, what she was eating, where was she at, etc. Problem is, she had quite a lot of photos near her home. Eventually a group of people went to triangulate her exact home address through those photos and went ahead and harassed her at her house. Well, I didn't hear anything further about the story but I hope it went well.

Point is, privacy has good correlation to security. Caring about privacy helps to improve your security posture as well.

Can you really trust them with your data?

Can you really trust the people inside the organization with your data?

Eric Murphy has a video about why he cares about privacy and gave various real world case studies on the consequences of not caring about it. Few of which involves employees spying on customers. On the more extreme end, there's even some that involves false crime charges against consumers.

I think the more extreme cases should raise some alarm bells. You may argue it may never happen to you, but can you argue the probability is 0%? When some powerful guy in the law wants to find you guilty, he will dig up everything and anything, and find fault with it. EFF covered a case with Ola Dini, basically a cyber security researcher whom was falsely accused of hacking into a system. Well, he did successfully defend himself. But the problem was, the police had access to his to phone. Being a cyber security researcher, the police took one of his of cyber security works and use it as evidence to charge him with attempted unauthorized access.

I do recommend watching Eric Murphy's video on why you should care about privacy too.

How to get started

You can check out privacy guides, its basically an opinionated wiki/blog/forum on privacy related topics. Awesome privacy is also a good resource that recommends privacy friendly software and services.

If I have to give a pointer, always keep in mind about Threat Modelling. Privacy isn't about hiding everything, its about choosing what to hide from who.