Privacy

I need to start checking myself when this question comes up during presentations and trainings. At some point someone always asks about privacy. In many cases they don’t even know…..I think anyway…..that they are asking a privacy question. The questions usually are posed as:

“If I put something in Google Drive is it safe?”

“If I put something in Google Drive can anyone see it?”

“Is it secure?”

“Can someone hack in and get my stuff?”

I’m finding the more I’m asked questions like this, the harder time I’m having keeping my frustrations in check….to the point I had to apologize to teachers a few weeks ago for getting a little too passionate about the topic.

So here’s what I believe…it’s my belief so take it as that.

“If I put something in Google Drive is it safe?”

As safe as anything you are probably going to put on the Internet! This is a good graph that shows how secure Google is compared to other online storage sites.

Can someone hack in? Yep…..if they get your info they can get in…but people can also break into your house….and people do….I’d like to see research of house break-ins verses accounts hacked in the US…that would be a fun comparison. So you tell me what’s more secure….your images backed up to a site like Flickr.com or the external hard drive sitting next to your computer?

“If I put something in Google Drive can anyone see it?”

Well….no…not anyone……but yes…..Google can see it. Here’s the thing….by using their service you allow them to see your stuff. This goes for anything on the Internet, not just Google. Can your bank see how much money you have? Yes. Can your credit card track your spending? Yes.

Our Love Hate Relationship With Technology

Here’s the thing that I tell everyone at the end of the day:

You have to trust somebody!

You do…that’s it. Who you trust is personal but you have to trust someone and the issue right now is we don’t know who to trust. I trust my bank to keep my data safe. I trust Google to use my information wisely. I trust mint.com with all of my financial data. Now…you might not trust these places and that’s fine…..but you have to trust someone. Target is a perfect example. We all trusted Target with our credit card information until that trust was broken. Once that happened we all had a choice to make…..will I trust them again?

Some of us do….others of us don’t. No matter what you decide…..it’s a personal decision. Here’s the thing….if it’s not Target, then who do you trust? Where do you shop? Amazon.com, Walmart, Safeway, your local hardware store? You see….if you have a credit card….you trust someone with that stored information…..you just do….or you don’t have a credit card and you don’t….and that’s fine too. Most people do have a credit and/or debit card, so most people are making a choice to trust someone. I struggle then with those that say they’re worried about someone having their information. I feel like you have basically two options:

1. Come to terms with the fact that breaches of information (ie what happened with Target) are going to occur….welcome to the 21st Century

or

2. Get rid of your credit cards/debit cards, cell phones, and anything else digital.

I personally choose option one; I believe that companies are truly doing their best to keep information protected. Nobody wants to be in Target’s shoes. It’s not fun for anyone involved. Yes…every company should do everything in their power to keep your data safe…but will there be hacks? Yes…there will be. Just like their will be robberies and home invasions in real life too.

We Love/Hate Technology

We’re in a time period where we as a society are trying to figure out how much privacy we’re willing to give up. We benefit from giving up our privacy but it’s also a scary concept.

We love that when we do a Google search they know so much about us they give us exactly what we want…if they didn’t we wouldn’t use them.

We hate Google because they know so much about us that the adverts scrolling on the side are things we’ve searched for.

We love that we can go to Amazon.com and get recommendations of books, things to buy and things relevant to us.

We hate that they know our buying habits and it creeps us out a bit that they come up with exactly what we want.

We love Facebook and the connections it provides us and the specific information that pops up for us to peruse.

We hate that Facebook knows us so well the ads are tailored specifically for what we’re looking for.

We’re all in this love/hate relationship right now. Or you just hate it and you’re not reading this right now because you have chosen not to use the Internet!

It’s come out in the news again just how not sure we are if we like this or not as a society. Google and Microsoft read emails of child pornographers, turned them into the authorities and had them arrested. Now…we like this…we like that bad people were caught….but we’re a little freaked out that Google can…and might, read our emails.

We’re not sure if we like this. We love it when technology allows us to catch the bad guys……we just hate it when we realize that means they’ve been watching us too. Here’s the thing…we can’t have it both ways. We can’t say go catch the bad guys without giving up our privacy to make sure we’re not one of them. The other options is we catch less bad guys and protect our own privacy. Personally, I like the idea that more bad people are being caught and if that means I give up some of my privacy, I can live with that sacrifice.

Changing our default from private to public

This is what we’re struggling with. Perhaps my life experiences have helped me to make this mind shift more quickly than some. The idea that privacy looks very different these days than it did a short while ago. That doesn’t’ mean that privacy doesn’t exist…it does. It just means you start with public. Everything you do is public and you work backwards from there. That’s a mind shift from where we were even just 15 years ago. Where we all started thinking our lives were private and we got to decide how public they were. That’s not the case! The moment you signed up for Facebook, bought a cell phone, or signed into an email account…..you became public.

Public is the new default……now……how you stay safe being public is what we need to focus on. How do you do the best you can to lock the windows and the doors; share what you want with whom you want and be as safe as possible? That’s the question we need to be asking. It doesn’t mean someone can’t or won’t try to break in…there have always been bad guys and there will continue to be bad guys…but we do the best we can, we trust who we trust, to keep ourselves and our families safe.