Fortify Your Data Privacy

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Understanding Data

Chapter 2 Data privacy

Chapter 3 Trends in data privacy regulation—and why they matter

Chapter 4 Data Privacy from a Personal Perspective

Chapter 5 Data Privacy from a Business Perspective

Chapter 6 How Google treats data privacy

Chapter 7 A Look Into How Facebook Treats Data Privacy

Chapter 8 How Amazon treats data privacy

Chapter 9 What You Should Do With Your Data

Chapter 10 Going forward

Conclusion

Introduction

Privacy is important. Privacy is the internal dialogue you have with yourself in your head. Privacy is the door closed in the medical exam room when the doctor is with you. Privacy is your personal 5 year road map. Privacy is not just for people with something to hide.

While in ‘real life’, this type of privacy comes naturally and with little thought, in the digital space the idea of privacy is skewed. This is because the vast majority of people don’t really understand what digital privacy entails.

Data privacy has always been important. Data privacy has also always been an issue. It’s why people put locks on filing cabinets and rent safety deposit boxes at their banks. However, as more of our data becomes digitized, and we share more information online, data privacy is taking on greater importance. As a society, we need to understand not only the value of data privacy, but what is at risk when we loosen the grip on our own personal data.

A single company may possess the personal information of millions of customers—data that it needs to keep private so that customers’ identities stay as safe and protected as possible, and the company’s reputation remains untarnished. With this having been said, data privacy is not exclusively a business concern. You, as an individual, have a lot at stake when it comes to data privacy. The more you know about it, the better able you will be to help protect yourself from a large number of risks.

This book is a part of Fortify Your Data, an effort to help educate business leaders, tech enthusiasts, and the average person on the emerging technologies. Fortify Your Data exists today as a book series and a website (fortifyyourdata.com) hosting video podcasts, audio podcasts, web articles, white papers. It is important to have information available in many mediums in order to reach many people, so please consider supporting Fortify Your Data online by viewing the additional free content.

Chapter 1

Understanding Data

What is data?

Before we get into data privacy (which is exactly what it sounds like it is), we should take a good look at what the term data means today. Data, as defined by Merriam-Webster is one of three things.

Factual information used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculations.

Information in digital form that can be transmitted or processed

Information output by a sensing device or organ that includes both useful and irrelevant or redundant information and must be processed to be meaningful.

These are all valid. You can generalize and combine these definitions further to simply this: data is information.

While data as it is used today generally has a technological connotation to it, data does not have to be on a computer screen to be data. Data is data. A filing cabinet with manila folders of physical paper is a form of data storage, not different from an external hard drive. Equally important to note is that there are pros and cons to having your data physically stored or digitally stored. Each also has their own challenges when it comes to security. Both are targets for thieves, because data has value.

The data that is most frequently targeted is the data that is easiest to extract money from. Those include, but are not limited to, credit card information, social security numbers, bank account information, cryptocurrency wallet keys, health care records, and more. These examples are very typically the first things that come to mind when people think about the notorious computer hackers breaching servers to get info. Things are changing in the hacking landscape in an extremely rapid rate, and the same is true for what data hackers can monetize.

Some data is not stolen, but offered away willingly (or unknowingly) to the many consumers that accept the terms of service without reading them. The innovations that social media platforms and other internet companies seem to offer for free do, in fact, have a cost. That cost is your personal data. Whether it is your searching habits and history, your contacts in your phone, or even your email conversations – that data, your personal data, is up for grabs and offered to the tech giants you give your patronage.

While many people seem to be peripherally aware of the lack of data privacy on platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, many people do not seem to understand the amount of data that these tech giants have a hold of. In later chapters, we will take a deep dive to broaden your understanding of what data is being targeted, where that data is going, and how it is used to generate profit for those that broker your data.

Chapter 2

Data privacy

What is data privacy?

Like ‘data’, ‘data privacy’ is a term that has been around for a really long time. It’s not new. Yet, we find ourselves in a society that has a reinvigorated interest in data privacy. So what exactly is data privacy?

Data privacy relates to how a piece of information—or data—should be handled based on its relative importance. For instance, you likely wouldn’t mind sharing your name with a stranger in the process of introducing yourself, but there’s