You Have to Save Yourself When the Digital Titanic Starts Sinking

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Last week, data from 533 million Facebook accounts leaked. Then, data from more than 500 million LinkedIn accounts leaked. And then more data leaked from 1.3 million Clubhouse accounts.

Is anyone else drowning in leaked data, or is it just me?

Think of it this way. The Titanic is sinking. You make it over to the Carpathia, but that ship is sinking too. And the rowboat you used to escape them is leaking as well. Before you know it, everyone is freezing in the North Atlantic and the next ship to come and save you knows exactly who you are, where you’ve been, and wants to tell you one weird trick to lose belly fat.

And Facebook won’t even tell you if your ship sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Is there anything you can do to plug the holes in all these privacy leaks?

It’s a dangerous world out there. Regulations in this area are murky and don’t protect consumers as much as they could. You can take steps to protect yourself, so when the next leak happens, you’ll at least have a life jacket. Here are four steps you can take:

1. Audit Your Public Information and Privacy Settings — Many of the latest leaks scrape public information from your public social network profiles, so limiting access here is important. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, and others all have account settings where you can control your privacy. Usually, these are in the main settings menu under privacy. Take time to find them. Turn off things like personalized ads, revoke requests to track, and don’t allow your information to be publicly available, particularly things like email addresses, birthdays, and phone numbers.
2. Start Using a Password Manager. Your privacy online is only as strong as your weakest password. A good password manager, like LastPass or 1Password, makes it easy to securely store and use unique, strong passwords across all of your devices. Some will even tell you if your credentials have been leaked online so you can easily change them. Find a password manager you like and stick to it. Then, if one of your passwords does leak, you can easily replace that one password and not worry about your hundreds of other passwords.
3. Stop Using Google Chrome — Browsing on Google Chrome is like agreeing to have a tiny little spy goblin following you around because Google is the largest digital advertiser in the world. Switch to Brave, Firefox, or Safari to make it just a little harder for Google to suck your data. That way if any of it does leak, there’s less to know about you.
4. Get an Ad Blocker — Part of the problem with online advertising these days is that your targeting profile is built by trackers that you don’t even see on web pages. And, these trackers slow down webpage load times, so you get a bad experience. A good ad blocker like uBlock Origin or Ghostery will limit those trackers, limiting your targeting profiles. You can always pause it or turn it off if a page doesn’t work correctly.

Taking control of your online privacy can be overwhelming, so don’t try to do everything at once. Take these steps one at a time so you can see how they affect your day-to-day browsing and habits. Make adjustments where you need to make it work for you.

You can protect yourself. I believe in you.

Now excuse me while I clean all this leaking data off me.

Hot Slices

🔪 If you read one thing this week, read Pranav Dixit’s take for Buzzfeed News about how technology is being used to undermine democracy in India. It’s a deeply personal piece of writing about the ways technology has affected their society for the worse. If you read one thing about social media this week, read this.

🔪 Procter & Gamble helped to develop an advertising targeting method being tested in China to get around iOS privacy protections. There’s so much bad here. Did one of the world’s largest advertisers share customer data with Chinese partners? Are they collecting information on us now? Can we opt out? Do they plan to use this to keep targeting people without their consent? This is a really bad look for one of the world’s biggest advertisers.

🔪 Gizmodo released a great explainer about FLoCs, which is Google’s answer to phasing out third-party ad-tracking cookies. The explainer shares why this system has a lot of hand waving and a “just trust us” vibe to it. It also explains how it sets up Google to be a monopoly in online ad targeting. If you don’t want to be “FLoCed,” start using a browser other than Chrome.

🔪 Bonus slice: The Electronic Frontier Foundation released “Am I FLoCed? so you can check to see if you’re a Chrome user whose data is being used this way.

Things to Pay Attention To

👀 Consumers now spend an average of 4.2 hours each day in apps. Advertisers everywhere are updating their media presentations with that stat.

👀 TikTok released a study on how users perceive ads on the platform, with 72% of those surveyed saying they “agree that ads on TikTok are perceived as inspiring.” More stats for advertisers, though the way they phrased these results sounds like it doesn’t really mean anything.

👀 Facebook shared their plan to connect U.S. residents with COVID-19 vaccine information. Good.

👀 Researchers from the University of Southern California found that Facebook’s ad delivery system discriminates against women in job ad delivery. No surprises here, though I thought the methodology could have been stronger.

👀 Google used a secret program called Project Bernanke to tip the digital advertising odds in favor of clients using its advertising tools. I’m sure that’s going to go over real well in their current anti-trust suits.

👀 Facebook will now let users appeal content left up after review to the Oversight Board. While I still have issues with Facebook’s weird attempts to build its own government, I am totally going to appeal any photos of me from high school.

👀 LinkedIn introduced new job titles of “Stay-at-home Mom” (and Dad) to better help job seekers show their career journey. How has this not been a thing on LinkedIn until 2021?

👀 Facebook released a video speed dating app called Sparked, claiming it is “video dating with kind people.” With how much I trust Facebook, I’d call it video dating for suckers.

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