Children’s & YA Fiction

This Week in Cybersecurity: NCA Data Privacy Week

January 27 – 31, 2025 is the Nation Cybersecurity Alliance: Data Privacy Week. What is Data Privacy? I am glad you asked. Let’s start more basic. Ask yourself what personal privacy is. Is it shutting your front door, closing your blinds, and having sensitive conversations in areas you know no one else is listening. In these situations, you are controlling the environment to give information only to the person you want. Controlling your online information should be thought of in the same way.

Privacy is right, and your choice for you or your information not to be observed or used without your permission. However, according to many TOS documents, just simply accessing an online service gives the business permission to view and use your data you give them. If you do not agree to those terms, then you do not use the service. They cannot access your driver’s license or bank/credit card information unless you use that information on their site.

The point of this article is to remind you to be mindful of what you are agreeing to when you skip reading the Terms of Service or Privacy agreement. There is a certain creep factor when you finally realize how much of your data is actually online. You do have some control of what you see when you do a vanity search on Google. If that is something you are interested in, please stay tuned to this section of the Wrap Up and I will be sharing those instructions in a later issue.

“If you are not paying for it, you are the product.”

How do you know if a website is collecting your data? The answer is in the title. So, the question then becomes, how do I control how much product(data) they are collecting? There is a tradeoff between convenience and privacy for many online services. As an example, if you want to share photos on Facebook, you have to give Facebook access to your photos. You can choose to grant access to just the photos you want to share but on iPhone I have to change access permissions for every photo I want to share. Once your photo is uploaded to Facebook, according to Facebook’s policy, “you grant them a license to store, copy, and share your photo with others, consistent with your privacy settings, meaning you control who can see it, but Facebook can still use the photo for platform operations and improvements as outlined in their terms of service; essentially, you own your content but give Facebook permission to use it within their guidelines.” according to the TOC agreement.

The key now becomes how do you gain control of your data. Change your online habits. Online service will ask permission to access more than they need. For instance, I have Sudoku app on my phone that requested access to my contacts, location, and my camera. Why in world would a sudoku game requesting access to my location or camera? For some of these, you can deny permission for the app to access those services, there is a switch in the iPhone app setting I can tap to deny access that data. Android is similar. Websites do similar data “mining” when you visit them. For an example, Google in many cases request access to your location in your browser. So, understand the trade-off and adjust at your habits to your comfort level.

Lastly, we need to remember that we need to be creating complex passwords and that we are changing them regularly. Enable multifactor authentication on sites that offer the service. Avoid unfamiliar emails that could be phishing. These are just a couple of options to protect your data from being unauthorized accessed by hackers.