What is Privacy ?

Privacy is your right, It has always been your right. But what is it ? Privacy is the assurance that your data is only seen by you or people/entity that you authorize. Let’s talk about Signal app, Messages sent via signal are end to end encrypted meaning only your device and the recipient device has keys to decrypt the message and read. This is a privacy feature, no one in the middle can decrypt your message unless they get hold of your private keys.

You might be having a tiktok account or an instagram account. They collect vast amount of data based on your activities. Whose post are you liking, whose post you are commenting, how much time are you spending on each reel/post/tiktok, what category is of your interest and much more. This is not limited to just tiktok or instagram but in general any app or website. The claims are not targeted claims but the whole internet generalised.

These apps collect data such as your name, email addresses, phone numbers and birthdates. They further share your data for third-party advertisers, marketing partners and other service providers for targeted advertising. When your data is shared by these providers it is also of high risk of security breaches as more entities hold your information.

You may use online tools in order to find which website has been breached and what data has been compromised. One of the those tools is https://haveibeenpwned.com/ . Not sponsored, just a tool which I personally use.

In order to check whether your data was part of a breach, you just need to enter your email address in the box and press pwned? button. It will return number of websites that reported a breach and what data was compromised.

The above image shows the number of websites/applications that reported my email to have been compromised along with my name email addresses, username and much more. The email I have used here is an old one when I was naive to the world of Internet.

The data compromised again in turn is sold at Black Market/ Dark web at a cost.

The security breach is one of the reason to which you should take a caution to which service do you use and what you share them. Further in the articles we will be sharing you with tips and other privacy and security tools you can use to further strengthen your privacy and online security.

I thank you for your time