If It’s Digital, It’s Vulnerable

In this everything-digital age, the only sure-fire way to protect your privacy is to remove your footprint entirely or make sure you have nothing anyone wants.

Back in November, media reported that hackers had gained access to the private messages of nearly 120 million Facebook accounts and had (at the time) already published such messages from 81,000 accounts, offering to sell access for 10 cents per account.

At the end of the day, the security of texts is only as good as the person sending them.

Late last year, Lancaster University published a research paper on the least-secure passwords that are often in use online. The paper, based on a leakedYahoo database of personal information, said that the most popular password favored by Yahoo users was “123456.” The second most common was the brilliant “password.” This was followed by “welcome” in third, and “ninja” in the fourth position.

The findings are in line with research released by SplashData last year, which showed the three most popular passwords globally were ‘123456’, ‘password’, ‘love’ and ‘12345’. The next two passwords on the list are actual words — “sunshine’ and “princess” while the final place is occupied by word “qwerty.”

Clearly, most of the account breaches happen because of weak passwords, and in this day and age of countless passwords, it’s a real struggle to come up with (and remember) something different for every single account. Doing so inevitably means going through that whole “forgot my password” procedure on a regular basis.

Even experts aren’t clear on which messaging platform is the safest because none is impenetrable.

According to several surveys, messaging applications Signal and Wickr are on the top of the list.

Many also advise that WhatsApp as safe to use but the app has a stigma for being owned by Facebook and it didn’t help that the app’s founder left the company due the privacy concerns.

Last week, amid the biggest the tech conference that exists, Apple took a swap at Amazon and Google by putting up this message on the side of a hotel: “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.”

But they’re not talking about hackers. They’re talking about selling customers’ data, and they’re suggesting that Amazon and Google use your data, overtly and anonymously to try to sell you stuff.

And it’s not just about tests, or hackers … or even selling you stuff.

A recent investigation by Motherboard ended up reportedly paying $300 to a bounty hunter to locate a phone, tracing the sell-out back to the mobile service providers themselves.

Motherboard claims that “T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and other not authorized to possess it”. No hacking necessary.

Data is the new diamonds, and it’s all vulnerable, whether the end game is celebrity gossip, political capital or making cash of the personal details of the masses.