IS PRIVACY DEAD IN AMERICA?

In our technology world today, privacy has been impacted severely. Online devices have become the norm more than the exception and now with increased automation in the form of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and artificial intelligence puts consumers and business at a higher risk. The even bigger challenge is how accessible online devices have become and how consumers and businesses still do not have the necessary education to understand the risk of exposing information online.

Consumers fail to see the risk they are taking. Consider social media for example. Checking in at specific locations tell criminals you are not home. Exposing family and employment information provides criminals with more information and potential victims. This is just one of the tools criminals… more specifically cybercriminals use. Another tool is using spam and phishing attacks to establish a link to your information by either transferring payload to your device that will collect information and send it to the criminals. These are the threats we hear reported, but why don’t we listen?

For many of us, we ignore the importance of our identity. We don’t recognize that our private information is valuable… to cybercriminals. In some cases, we don’t see the value in protecting what is important to us without realizing that many of these important things are digital. We put emphasis on reacting to the problem, but the bigger problem is we don’t know when to react and by the time we do, severe damage has been done, leaving us to rebuild.

Businesses are not that different from their customers. While consumers purchase insurance to replace some of the important things rather than identifying the vulnerable points of entry and closing them off, businesses weigh the risk of maintaining protection against the threat against the cost of a breach. The obvious difference is that businesses can throw money at the problem after the fact where we as consumers cannot… because it has been stolen along with our credit, credibility and other valuable assets. Additionally, our time to recovery is a much longer period of time versus that of a business.

Governments are a completely different story. While privacy is important, the privacy laws that are supposed to protect its citizens are only enforced if they are grouped in with a government breach. When a business is breached, our only recourse is to file suit against the business. Filing suit against the government is also an option but is met with a great deal of concern and fear that taking on the government because we were exposed could result in very little restitution, no recovery and increased exposure. Additionally, the increased terror threat has given governments license to intrude on its citizen’s privacy in an effort to identify serious risks to its citizens, but where is the line drawn in the sand? The phrase “reasonable suspicion” has now become so broad that we are not only a potential victim, but also a potential threat.

So what can we do? First, we need to work on the premise that we are already exposed. Our private information is already out there. Government legislation – like businesses are throwing money at the problem, but businesses and interest groups are getting in the way of tighter regulations around protecting our private information, so resolving this problem is now in our hands. In order to maintain our private assets, we need to first establish what is important that should be private. Identify where the asset is and who else has access to it – this includes our devices and the most vulnerable part of our “network”… the users of those devices. We must become more aware of the dangers of online devices. Who has them… what’s on them in the form of our information and the applications installed on them… and most importantly… what the risks are to using them. Once we know the answers to these initial questions, we can determine if the asset should be better secured and/ or removed from your digital footprint, which is a challenge in itself.

As consumers and users of online devices – be it a computer, laptop, smartphone, tablet or an IoT device – we should understand the device and the dangers. Online devices can be weaponized in the wrong hands and dangerous in the uneducated hands. Would you put a gun in the hands of your child without explaining the dangers? Online devices are not that different, but we as “responsible” people don’t see the danger in handing our phone to our child in the back seat of the car to calm them down. We have figured out the dangers of a loaded weapon, but we now need to understand that our phone is just as deadly.

Consider your privacy today. What is impacting it? Is there anything you can do about it?

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