All of us have made privacy mistakes at some point in our privacy journeys. In an effort to help those earlier on in that journey, please share some of the mistakes you’ve made, and how you could have prevented it.
Used Facebook for years.
I knew Instagram was privacy invasive long before I ever started using it. Still decided to use it for some reason. Anyways, glad to have my dopamine receptors back.
Recently I got conned into giving a couple websites my email address for an alleged discount thinking, well I’m going to give it to them with the purchase anyway. Only for them to then request my phone number.
Couple lost sales for them.
Last year I purchased a domain name for our farm business as a place holder knowing I’ll eventually get around to putting together a website when life allows.
Well the domain registration site had a “privitize my infomation” button…which I forgot to check…for the first 12 hours.
EVERY web and app developer from here to Pakistan now has my phone number and I get about 4-6 calls a day asking if I want help developing an app for our website.
I’ve had to block entire area codes with an installed spam blocker just to slow them down and get some small bit of peace back.
Moral of the story, Never forget to hit that privitize button.
I changed the user-agent of my browser to “Error: No browser installed”. Can’t be more unique than that, I guess. That was 30 years ago, though, I don’t think it will hurt me today 😆
I forgot to tap the “location” button on my phone to set it to “off” for about ten years.
Using an Android phone and Google Chrome. Never again.
Being born
I’m gonna cut this short and say all of them… 😂 its a marathon not a sprint.
It’s been quite a journey:
- Posting accurate personal info to my Google+ account when I first signed up
- Signing in to Google on my phone and browser
- Using an Android phone from eBay of dubious origin
- Sending confidential info via email
- Using the same gmail address for everything
- Signing up for things with my real info when it wasn’t necessary
- Handing out my phone number to loyalty programs
- Running hacked game APKs without checking for malware
- Using the User Agent Switcher extension on MS Edge, which was subsequently updated to include an infostealer
- Using browser extensions of unknown provenance
How to avoid:
- Ironically, Windows 10 started me on my privacy journey. Microsoft was in my face enough with privacy offenses that I began moving to Linux and investing time into my privacy.
- Don’t post unnecessary info to social media.
- Never email confidential info.
- Use a password manager, or at least some organized text file if you have an encrypted disk.
- FOSS software is more available and user-friendly than ever, always look for a FOSS alternative.
I still have digiaids from Limewire back in the day. I also regularly type “magic” between a certain you and a tube and I have no idea who operates that site.
Advice my parents to use outlook. They were using an ISP email service which we had to get rid of. I wasn’t sure if tutanota was ready for them yet and they already were a bit familiar with outlook. It was a bit of a trade off back then.
