Can you (should you?) stop being a data product?

One week after starting a #bigdata #detox, I am still alive. I am testing whether a digital addict and data freak like me can survive without "being the product". The short answer is yes, but it comes at a financial cost and it helps to have some IT skills of your own. And frankly, I did not manage to go 100% off the "you're-being-profiled-and-then-sold-market" (I actually read a lot of privacy statements). By the way, when I write about "you and your data", that's because the way I treat my data and my privacy can also affect your data and your privacy. After all, I hold personal data and maybe pictures and movies with you on them. So what does my digital world - in a privacy aware context - look like: 

Category 1: You and I not the product at all, our data are 100% encrypted or private

For backing up all of our family's computers and my rather extensive photo, video and music (digital) collection, I've been using SpiderOakOne for several years. It comes at a yearly subscription cost, but all data are tucked away securely and 100% encrypted. I hope I never have to do a full restore due to the low speed of restoring (data is stored at bit/block level so any meaningful volumes - I have 4 TB - need extensive computing time before they can be restored). For daily life with the same photos, movies, home movies, documents, etc. I've come to love the Synology products which allow you to run your own file server, mail server, chat server, Wordpress server, backup server (various protocols, including Time Machine over LAN), etc. It all comes out of the box and sits peacefully humming in a RAID5 configuration in the basement (mostly in energy save mode). It also allows me to stream my music, photos or movies from any device, anywhere in the world (it even solves your dynamic IP address issues for free). Just in case it breaks down, I attached 3 (old) external harddisks, onto which the Synology NAS quietly makes an incremental backup of everything every night. So the Synology took me off all cloud based storage solutions such as iCloud, Box, Google Drive and Dropbox. It allowed me to take my picture collection of Flickr.

Category 2: You, I and our data are not the product, because I'm paying a fee

Some services are just good, so paying for them makes sense. I have a paid subscription to Vimeo to share privately and securely selected amateur video materials. Because Adobe makes me pay a subscription to use Lightroom anyway, I don't mind using their Adobe Cloud as very temporal storage for picture on the road. But all of our devices back up automatically to the Synology in the basement. You might not make the link, but this is also the category in which my and your (traditional) bank sits. Your data are not being used to profile your personality and then sell your personality insights to advertisers. Already today, there are (free) Fintech banks in the market who are doing this, but today, traditional banks are not making a living out of selling your individualised personal or behavioural data.

Moving as much of our household data into this model also required another move to happen. Slowly but surely, our family has become a fully Apple driven household, at least as far as mobile devices are concerned. The motives were not driven by "privacy concerns", it just happened. But as a consequence, it made it possible to move family calendar and personal and family contact lists into Apple's privacy model, which promises not to use your data to profile you towards third parties. So your addresses in my address book are now safer and more private.

I use a password manager to store my passwords, a strong password for every single identity. It has proven its value several times.

I pay - out of sympathy - for the services of ProtonMail.CH, a good alternative to so called free email services that psycho-analyse your every single move or thought.

Just like banks did years ago, so have Evernote, Netflix and Spotify become part of our household infrastructure. Of course they all profile me, but they do it inside their own product and revenue model. Not to the benefit of random other data gatherers or advertisers. To any of those, a massive data leak would be close to disaster.

Category 3: Our behaviour is no longer as transparant for advertisers

Doing a search on internet should not contribute to a digital profile somewhere halfway around the world. The entire family switched to DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. DuckDuckGo needs to make money too, but they do it in the old fashioned way. That means that they show you search results and paid adds that are based on the key words that you use to search, but after your search, they forget about you and do not store all your internet activity to continuously profile your personality. And they make a profit on what you buy at Amazon. The DuckDuckGo App also tells you by how many "trackers" your behaviour is being monitored and stored. It scores every website with a category from A-D, A being a website which keeps you fully anonymous and has a documented and validated privacy policy (https://tosdr.org). A D-class website is basically a place where you come to be stripped of all of your data. Most sites I go to, seem to be B-class. Tell me if you find an A-class one (DuckDuckGo does not count)... But the great thing is, the app seems to block the trackers, so you give nothing away.

Category 4: It's hard to escape from some.

I did not manage to escape from WhatsApp but they only profile my behaviour, not my actual messages. There are simply too many people on WhatsApp to escape from it. I kept Messenger, but only to communicate with my son when he is isolated in the university's library. Messenger is then his only connection to the real world (which shows that it has become "un-missable"). I kept Instagram, vanity I guess.

And finally, I did not give up LinkedIn. There is too much to learn, too many people too meet. I guess I'll keep paying Microsoft with some more data for a while...

Afterthought: there is nothing intrinsically wrong or immoral about business models where the consumer gets free services in return for being profiled towards advertisers. All societal forces (press, educators, consumers, law makers, big data processors, ...) can however contribute positively to creating more transparency so that consumers make educated choices. Pay 4 EUR a month for a private e-mail or get it for free in return for being fully profiled and having your profile sold. Both choices are fair, neither type of provider is immoral, but the consumer should make the informed choice.