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Privacy Needs a Delete Button

by Robert Neivert, COO, Private.me

Privacy needs a delete button.

The cloud manages many things very well, but privacy is not one of them. I’ll make the
argument that a major problem we’re facing in the search for real online privacy, is that we don’t
have a delete button for the data we share and the data that gets misused. Today, for
individuals, the inability to retract data both prevents and destroys efforts to retain privacy
online.

As individuals, much of our private information uniquely defines who we are, and is also very
hard -- sometimes impossible -- to change. Still, when a person’s information is hacked, stolen
or misused, there needs to be a way for the victim to recover, to regain privacy and to protect
their personal identity. Instead, we are immediately trapped when personal, private,
unchangeable information is compromised. We can’t change it like we could if a password were
breached, and we can’t take the information back. We can’t change our fingerprints once
hackers get it. We can’t change our social security numbers, our birthdates, the names of the
schools we went to, or our mothers’ maiden names, and the list of examples goes on and on. If
you haven’t been affected by hackers and a breach of private information yet, just think for a
second about what you might do if your private information was compromised. If you’ve been
the victim of an online privacy breach, then you already know the devastation. Once stolen, the
information is quickly sellable on the dark web to be used in phishing, credit fraud, or hundreds
of other scams.

Should we stop giving out our information?

Unfortunately, the simplest sounding solution just isn’t viable. Withholding all of our information
will cut us off from the companies and services we want. There are too many sacrifices we’d be
forced to make and we’d prevent companies from offering us the services we want. Companies
need (or at least want) personal information from each of us, partially to confirm that we are
who we say we are (passwords, security questions, for example), and partially to market more
effectively to us. Facebook, for example, uses information about a person’s login location for
both. Their first use of our location data at login is a check to see if we are logging in from a
new location, in which case a second factor request or a simple alert may be triggered. Next
Facebook commonly uses location information to send targeted ads relevant to the location
we’re in.

The information we give companies is very valuable to their business, growth and bottom line.
This also makes the data and the company’s data collection and storing systems big targets for
hackers, at our expense.

There are some actions that each of us can take that help protect our data and privacy, but
unfortunately, most are merely a band aid. Here are a few:

• Don’t reuse passwords; use a password program if at all possible to generate large
complex passwords and manage them for you.

25 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2015 Edition
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