The digital privacy conundrum

Have we finally reached a tipping point when it comes to the treatment of our personal data?

We’ve all known, at some level, that if you want stuff for free, the provider of those goods or services needs to find some other way to monetise it — and that when it comes to the likes of Google and Facebook’s platforms, we’re as much the product as we are the users. A digital economy that’s largely built on ad sales means that some degree of user tracking is going to be the norm.

So why are we suddenly so shocked about potential breaches to our digital privacy? The real watershed moment — which we all seem to have been living through in horrifying slow motion since 2016 — is the realisation that this personal info is useful beyond just figuring out what ads to serve specific users and can, perhaps, be used to identify people’s political persuasions and then target them with information (often false) that serves to polarise opinions. Ultimately, that makes the political dialog that’s so critical to a functional democracy more difficult.

So besides quitting social media entirely, what can we do about it? Locking down your privacy settings is certainly a good first step, although the level of access we’re given to these does vary depending on our location. The EU’s got tough new privacy laws (known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR) that come into effect on May 25th, 2018, and will force the likes of Facebook to be very transparent about what personal data is being collected and how it is (and can) be used.

At present, Australia doesn’t have a direct equivalent to the GDPR (we still largely rely on the pre-internet Privacy Act 1988 for our digital privacy laws), but there has been talk among our politicians of eventually implementing one.

In the meantime, how much privacy you have often comes down to how much you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and get into the guts of your account and/or application settings.

We’ve detailed how to do that for specific platforms many times over the years in APC — privacy is very much woven through the fabric of both our mag and our sister publication TechLife — and we will, of course, continue to provide detailed and useful information when it comes to safeguarding your personal data as we travel into our ever-moredigital future.