Privacy | My experience so far in getting back control

The year was 2016. I was at at AWS re:Invent – the world’s largest Cloud conference. I met one of my ex colleagues in the hallway. I vividly remember the time to be around 5 in the evening (I am pretty sure about the time because the hallway gets extremely crowded during the mornings and evenings when 1000s of people are making their way in/out of the conference centre).

We had a small chat and I was back at my room after my dinner. And then I start getting notifications on my phone saying the “My ex-colleague’s company is in the news!!!”. I dismiss the notifications and try to get some sleep.

The next day, at the same conference, I was seated for a keynote and one of my colleage brings along a partner (with whom we closely work for business). We have our usual introductions and small talk and spend the next 2 hours listening to the keynote. Around lunch time, I get a similar notificaiton on my phone – that the partner’s company is in the news!!

To be honest, those incidents freaked me out. We also had many random discussions at work about how some of these big tech companies were mining data (I remember discussions about Facebook tapping into device’s microphone). I had a Google Nexus phone back then and I was thinking if Google was tapping into the micrphone as well.

But being in technology, one understands how expensive it is to perform speech to text (even at Google’s scale) for displaying Ads. Soon, I realized the power of location data. Combine that with 1000s of other data points collected through browsers, devices, apps. These algorithms employed by Google and Facebook have become pretty sophisticated. So, powerful that they were able to send targetted advertisements within hours of me meeting someone!!!

Those two incidents were beginning of a long journey (that’s still far from over) of me trying to get some control over my data and privacy. The journey is a mixed bag and definitely with some serious tradeoffs with convenience.

In the following series of posts, I plan on writing about my experience so far. The choices that I have made. The deliberations that I had to make before making those choices. And my views now after using those choices for a while. I am hoping that it would help someone else make such choices informed.

The first step was about getting facebook out of my life!!