~$ "Reflecting on Individual Freedoms: Anonymity and Privacy in Society"
Honestly, it's a really sensitive topic and everyone has their own perspective and perception of this topic. If being democratic or having freedom of speech and expression, the idea of secularism and equality and stuff like justice with fairness are your main concerns. Then congratulation as an Indian we have all those privileges and also for most of the world, it's true, except for China and North Korea.
But things get cheesy when you add the right to data privacy to this list of an ideal society.
What is privacy?
Understanding the concept of privacy:~
You lock your room from inside to stay private and to stay away from distractions, closing the door so that no one sees what you are doing is the core concept of privacy cus' everyone knows it's your room but no one knows what you are doing in it.
Privacy can be defined as "being in charge of your own information and choosing who deserves to know it and who doesn't..."
Unspoken Agony: Observable but Unresolved
In the 21st century the need for "RIGHT TO PRIVACY" has been a widely fueled topic across the globe. The sheer need for data privacy laws and civil rights of privacy has increased tremendously over the decade.
As Edward Snowden remarked,
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
No doubt we are living in an age where everyone has a digital footprint and that we are being tracked of our every action. Raging from our social information to our financial statistics and all the way to location tracking, everything is being mapped and stored. The United States has already been proven guilty of mass surveillance over citizens without their proper consent. Imagine a guy sitting remotely at his desktop monitoring your activities and logs, gives chills down the spine right?
The right to privacy has become a myth as said by many because not just the government but tech giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft are guilty of harvesting tons of data from their user base. As the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden stated in his documentation that, Google can read every email you send while drop-box can examine every document you upload and Microsoft can scan and read every document you ever write in Office 365, and if these companies can do it so does the guy working for the government cus' it's all interlinked, and this cooperates are usually supposed to share this statistical data with the law-enforcement.
Everyone knows this happening yet no one wants to step up and make reforms about this...
Anonymity and privacy sound so similar yet they are so different.
Metadata: A Curse to Privacy?
Understanding metadata:~
Let's say you wrote an article so it's understood that you'll probably write down the date on which you wrote it along with the "Title of the article" then you'll write your name cus' you are the author, you'll probably have this much information on the article right?. So this is the metadata about the article that describes 'How, When and by whom the article was written.
So we can describe metadata as "data that provides information about other data". In other words, it is "data about data".
How does metadata reveal so much about our personal identity?
Let's understand this,
If someone has collected metadata about your call history the person can easily identify how much time you spend on your phone calling and whom do you call along with your service provider's name and how much time you talk on the phone with a particular person. That's a whole lot of statistical data. So it's fair to say metadata reveals more information about you than what your close friends and relatives know.
Similarly, the images that we post online contains a substantial amount of metadata such as
type of camera used,
mode of flash,
aperture open time and size,
date, time of capture,
location info,
type of phone (if the image was captured using a phone), its model, etc.
So even if we think we have successfully managed to protect and conceal our online identity, still our metadata can be harvested and it can reveal a whole lot of information about us.
So when you look at a broader picture even though you have posted a simple selfie from your private account it still holds a whole lot of information than you can imagine.
Similarly, as a tool of mass surveillance, many developed countries use IMSI catchers (International mobile subscriber identity-catcher) to collect metadata directly from users smartphone. And as for today, a smartphone has become a vital part of our lives it upholds a lot of information including our search results, location history, screen time and our Internet service provider etc.
Is privacy really becoming a myth?
Seriously metadata harvesting renders the idea of privacy useless...
What is Anonymity?
Understanding the concept of anonymity:~
Anonymity simply means "data in which the personal identifiers have been either removed, substituted, masked or aggregated. This allows data to be shared among interested parties without worrying about the information disclosure of the first originator..."
The Idea of Anonymity
If you think about it anonymity is probably the best form of privacy. Probably because you get to be in charge of your own identity, But when you look at the broader picture being anonymous means concealing your identity from social media using encrypted services, using alternate for most of the Google services and whatnot, it just ends up making our lives hard cus' we are not in public domain our friends and relatives can't socially connect with us and it's not usually seen companies or colleges accepting your super encrypted proton mail as a legit mailing service, you'll be eventually prompted to use Google or Outlook now and then. So the idea of complete anonymity seems kind of impossible.
How to stay Anonymous?
Let's emphasize how to anonymize ourselves and stay safe on the internet. It might seem a bit overwhelming in the beginning:~
- Choosing the right operating system
Using Linux provides us better control over the amount of data that is being sent out of our computer, It's open source and you can choose what services you need and want to run and it's highly customizable on the other hand Windows and Mac OS X are great but windows as an Operating System is kind of, off the beat when it comes to controlling the services and privacy while Os X is great in terms of managing privacy but it has highly closed environment so you don't really know what's happening at the server-side, yet apple has strong privacy policies compared to windows. So it can be trusted if you want to.
Linux Kernels focused on Privacy - Tails OS, Whonix, Qubes OS
- Using TOR
The Onion Router or Tor is highly appreciated for its anonymity features, it's highly metadata-resistant and sets up tor proxies that change almost every second. It makes us anonymous to a great extent.
- Use decentralized or open source apps
Use apps such as Signal (Messaging), ProtonMail (Email service), DuckDuckGo (Search Engine), and Firefox (Browser) are some apps that highly focus on user privacy. These apps are highly encrypted which makes them stand out from most of their counterparts.
- General Awareness
We should be aware of the services we use and their purpose. Often it's observed when we require to make an OTP verification for a certain app, we have to allow the messaging permissions for that matter but as soon as OTP verification is done how many of us revoke the permission that is no longer needed. So it should be our general awareness to look for apps that are asking for unreasonable services.
"...sometimes it gets bad, I still remember calendar app on my mobile (Xiaomi) asked for contact permission and I remember denying it, As soon as I did that my app just crashed giving me an error 'you've restricted required permissions'. So ask yourselves why does a calendar require contact info anyways..."
MythBuster: VPNs make you Anonymous?
VPN makes you anonymous, just use VPN...
Honestly, NO it doesn't make you anonymous not at all it just establishes an encrypted tunnel between you and VPN server you choose to connect and this can be easily stripped and traced back to you. Also, it gets really fishy cus' the company that's providing you service has access to all your data that you search via the VPN tunnel and that data can be either sold by them or just in case if the company gets hacked you are still doomed in the name of anonymity. There seems no anonymity in that. Right?
VPN is best used when you have to access apps or particular sites that are not available in your country in such cases VPN serves the best. Except that there is nothing much to it.
Conclusion
Summing this up anonymity is preferred when you are doing something that you wouldn't want to be traced back to you. While maintaining privacy should be everyone's top priority.
But the bigger picture that everyone misses out on is that people's mentality on this topic we live in a time where people are not much aware of the importance of the right to data privacy and that's what fuels companies and law-enforcement officers to push forward such mass-surveillance policies.
So ask yourselves do you really wish to live in a world where all your activities are mapped, while every transaction is being tracked, where someone always has an eye on you?
Stay aware, Stay safe
Anyways, That's all Signing off!!!