Privacy – the naivety of our lot

These days there is significant hype on governments snooping on us. This seems to be so widespread that the question now is not “if you spy”, but “how much do you spy”.  But this post is not about big brother; it is more towards how companies handle our personal data.

Take this example which was recently narrated by an acquaintance. They were at a Tech fair/ symposium in the Bay area where they had a chance to interact with personnel from LinkedIn. In their enthusiasm to showcase the newest features, one of LinkedIn’s marketing managers simply whipped out his tablet, asked for my friends name…. and then voila, my friend was looking at her own profile – in an editable format…. wait a minute…; wasn’t this information supposed to be private!!!

This does cause me some discomfort. On one hand, I may have presumed that it it is possible that some tech genius could dig deep into my account, I wouldn’t have expected this access from some mid-rung marketing manager. If you can access the data, well – then one could even presumably alter it; given that we are moving towards storing more and more data in the cloud and forgetting most of it – any change perhaps may rarely be detected – if detected at all. Worst case, some malevolent soul, alters your data – which for some reason brings you into the cross-hairs of the super-snoops at the NSA…… well, there could be a lot of explaining to do!

I spent some-time sifting through the terms and conditions – take LinkedIn’s for example, which has long and onerous paragraphs like “you grant LinkedIn a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn, including, but not limited to, any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and/or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties. Any information you submit to us is at your own risk of loss.” 

I didn’t find any information saying that they would protect my information….

Now, I am not saying that you should immediately go and pull all your information off LinkedIn; or you should try to read all the terms and conditions (which is written in verbose text, aimed at being as broad and fuzzy as possible). But you should understand and be aware that there are potential downstream ramifications of what you post online. Deluding oneself into thinking that this information is safe and secure is naive at best. I am not sure there is an easy way out of this – apart from becoming a digital hermit, a stance I certainly don’t advocate. 

On the flip side, perhaps this deficit opens the doors to others who can promise a more secure platform – and stand by it. Yes, they still perhaps could be hacked by the NSA….. but at least not by some disgruntled employee…