Your world - According to whom?? Is someone pulling your strings?
Jake Wiley, CPA
Real Estate | Private Equity | Storage Investments | Limited Partnerships | Deals | REITs | Tax | Podcaster | Thought Leader | CRE
For absolute transparency, the opinions in this post are mine alone and not that of my employer.
Last week I watched the “The Great Hack” on Netflix, and it opened my eyes to the potential extent of data mining that is being used on each of us and how that impacts your perception of the world and what’s real and really happening vs. what is being curated and fed to you. Big thanks to David Carroll and Carole Cadwalladr for grabbing onto the issue, not letting it go and seeing the investigation through.
The world you see might be very different if you log out of your internet browser and Amazon and use an incognito browsing tab because you have theoretically just become anonymous? Take it a step further and search yourself and see what you get in this incognito world, kind of interesting when you take yourself out of the center of your universe.
While Cyber is such a hot topic, fraud, ransomware, etc happening all the time, I realized that I am exposed to it based on what I do, but you don’t see a ton of news about it. This is likely because 1) those that are victims don’t want to publicly disclose the fact and 2) those that are perpetrating it on a larger scale are good at what they do and keep it off the radar.
While I am a pretty open book and don’t think my life is tabloid-worthy, I also don’t feel particularly comfortable knowing that everything I send electronically can be read, brought back to life for someone else's gain. I’ve spent a little time looking into ways I can personally take back control and there are a million apps that supposedly protect the data and encrypt point to point, but how do I know that.
They say if the product is free then “You are the product”. Meaning the data you provide by using it is how money is being made. So, then it's a matter of trying to figure out what is safe. Someone or a Brand you trust has to stick their name on it and the product has to address our concerns or help us discover risk while also solving for it. Where should you look and who can you trust? I did find a few tools that fit the mark.
A new app that Mark Cuban is using and advocating for, Dust, Cuban promotes the app because he once had the experience of having his private messages read publicly. He strongly believes that we should protect ourselves by protecting our messages.
From a browsing experience I looked for ways to put a virtual barrier between my devices/end use and the internet and found a few VPN providers like Safer VPN that allows you to browse and use the internet behind a Virtual Private Network rather than from your direct IP address.
Lastly, thinking through Two-Factor authentication “2FA”, the painfulness of this process is what creates a barrier to use. This is where you use apps and sites that require you to authenticate yourself with another method in addition to your password and has you sitting around waiting for text messages or trying to figure out where and what the google authenticator is. Authy.com, formerly Twilio, is an example of an application that helps to streamline the process by bringing all the 2FA requests into one app that can be managed across multiple devices and platforms. Long story short, by making the process easier and centralized, you should actually seek out platforms that utilize or have the option for 2FA and be willing to take the extra step and opt in where it's optional to better protect yourself from breaches.
Please note, I am not making product recommendations here, but rather providing examples of options in the space to help provide security. The point that is worth bringing up for a second time is that we are all used to/expect free apps for this type of stuff, but there is a reason the apps are free and its because of the data that you contribute allows for monetization somewhere along the way, so you should be expecting to/looking to pay for these services so you know what the actual consideration is in the exchange! There may be feature limited versions that provide some of the capabilities and the intent is not to sell/use your data but to entice you to upgrade but be very wary of “Free” apps.
In conclusion, I’d like to shine a bit of light on personal cyber/data security as I don’t think it gets as much attention as it deserves. Since there are millions of things happening every day that are important but never hit your radar, be open minded about why and how the information/news and the products you see all the time end up in your feeds. If you get that deja-vu feeling about something you are seeing, or that the information/ads/news seem to really be tied together albeit not directly linked and you are forming new opinions/feelings about topics/products it might be time for an online refresh. I’d really like to hear how others are thinking about this because I have personally just started to put a little brain power behind this.