Technical Tuesday: Privacy Policies (an Overview)

A few weeks ago a fellow employee told me a story about how her daughter was contacted via text message by someone to whom she had never given her number, and when asked the boy who contacted her stated that he was able to get her phone number off of a list of Florida Residents. This employee as a mother was shocked and wanted to know how to fix this. So I told her about her privacy policies and how to tweak them to not share your information. 

In the next two months of Technical Tuesdays, We are going to explore social media and also some of the larger companies (Google, Microsoft, and Apple) to evaluate how they term their Privacy Policies and how you can tweak them to keep your information safe.

As this is just an Overview, I hope that you will save the page and come back as we explore each one in depth. Before we jump in… some housekeeping… 

Number 3-I am not out to bad mouth these companies, or anything that is in their privacy policies.  . I am just giving you the basic information that you need to help protect your personal information while continuing to work with these companies. I’ve picked these companies as examples because of the major role that they play in all of our daily lives, and the global presence they all have.>

Number 4-This is not Legal advice and all information given has been obtained via the website of the company.

Number 5-I am not a lawyer (yes, I am repeating this) I don’t want to go to court. I just want you to know what your privacy policies are saying and also how to take down your information without paying some company to do it. 

To get us started:

We are going to go over what the definition of a privacy policy is,  then we will explore how companies are collecting your information, and how some of the companies we use do with that information. 

Definition of Privacy Policy:

 A privacy policy is a statement or legal document (in privacy law) that discloses some, or all, of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses, and manages a customer or client’s data. Personal information can be anything that can be used to identify an individual, not limited to the person’s name, address, date of birth, marital status, contact information, ID issue,  expiry date, financial records, credit information, medical history, where one travels, and intentions to acquire goods and services. In the case of a business a privacy policy is often a statement that declares a party’s policy on how it collects, stores, and releases personal information. It informs the client what  information is collected, and whether it is kept confidential, shared with partners, or sold to other firms or enterprises. Privacy policies typically  receive a broader more generalized treatment, as opposed to data use statements which tend to be more detailed and specific.

“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy”>Privacy policy – Wikipedia

So each and every single one is completely different and not only do they vary from website to application but many of our most loved appliances and wearables have their own privacy policies also.

How do they collect the information:

Now let’s take a quick look at how they collect the information. These social media services are free to use, but like anything else they are a company and companies are in the business of making money. Please keep this in mind as you read further. 

The data they are collecting tells them information from your name, to your email, to the links that you click on, and the products that you look at. It’s all being recorded to more effectively sell you products you’re interested in, and keep you engaged on their sites. 

Now the first line in most of these policies is “Information that you provide to us” This means that they keep and have access to at any time the information that you have personally given to them. Which means that they (Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook…Etc…) can access that information at any point and  can use that information as they see fit. Usually this means helping you with a certain problem such as logging into their platform. 

Now let’s review what information we, as users, give these platforms :

-Your Full Name

-Your Phone Number or Email

-Your Birthday (in some cases)

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Here is a picture of the information you give to Google when signing up  to use their products and services.

 Now we don’t really give a second thought to giving this information out most of the time. If a friend were asking for any of this information I probably wouldn’t hesitate in telling them, in fact I’d probably repeat it just to make sure they understood me. Clicking accept on privacy policies has become so common that they receive that same exact treatment, but what we seem to forget sometimes is that these companies are not our friends, they couldn’t even be considered colleagues in most cases. So even though a lot of the time these services are free, the primary reason that these companies exist is to make money for themselves and their stockholders.     

What happens to your information:

So they sell the data that you provide to them. This information is usually cryptic and coded and also just a mass set of data that is something like 3 out of 5 of our users liked the blue couch and clicked on that ad more than the red couch but on a much larger scale (like millions). 

It’s not as scary as the media makes it and also they are usually not giving information like your name or address in these instances. Now that statement doesn’t apply to all companies nor does it apply to company data breaches. So we are going to explore each company and you can make up your mind and learn how to monitor your own information. 

I hope you will come back and use the links below for the following Technical Tuesday post.

As always, Happy Computing 🙂