Name: How to make your data more private online
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NOVA

Online privacy isn’t a switch—it’s a dial. And you get to control how much data you share, and with who. Here’s how to make your data more private.

You do have some control in how much data you share online.

How to make your data more private online

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Online privacy isn’t a switch—it’s a dial. And you get to control how much data you share, and with who. Here’s how to make your data more private.

You do have some control in how much data you share online.

Tech & Engineering

How to make your data more private onlinePremiered: May 21, 2024Dr. Alok Patel: What can I do right now to protect my privacy and my security? To learn tips and tools to preserve my data on both fronts, I'm chatting with hacker and educator, Matt Michell, and cybersecurity expert, Eva Galperin. First up, privacy. Sorry, privacy. Matt is a privacy advocate at Crypto Harlem, as in cryptography, the process of hiding or coding information.Okay, what do I do to make all this safer for me? What do I do? Who do I talk to? How do I start?Matt Michell: You have to ask yourself, is this a problem that needs to be fixed? Privacy isn't a switch, it's a dial. You get to control how much you share with who and with what. Have you ever used this website called Google?Dr. Alok Patel: I've heard of it.Matt Michell: Yeah. Well, let's check this out. Well, if we go here to myactivity.google.com, it'll show us all the things that you've been doing. So for example, when we go here, we see all the different Google services that you use. I don't think they make a service you don't use.Dr. Alok Patel: These platforms are so deeply embedded in many of our lives and for good reason. They make products that can be really useful. It's hard for me to imagine going a single day without searching the web or using a navigation app,.but they also suck up a lot of our data. It's a trade-off that I'm comfortable making within reason. I didn't know this, but I can literally just delete huge amounts of data that Google is storing about me. And the same is true for a lot of other services.Matt Michell: We can dial to whatever level we feel comfortable. For example, on LinkedIn, you would just click on Me and then you would go to your settings and privacy. Here, when we go to manage your activity, it tells you that you started sharing your LinkedIn data with a permitted application.Dr. Alok Patel: Treating privacy like a dial means it's not all or nothing. You can have your data caked and eat it too.Now I'm thinking that I want to log into everything, all my social media, my email, my LinkedIn, everything regularly and look to see who is using these.Matt Michell: Exactly. It is about awareness. Furthermore, the companies, they know how many people actually use the privacy controls, and by you even peeking in it, you're saying, I believe privacy matters.Dr. Alok Patel: At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Eva shows me how I can take my privacy game to the next level, learning some surveillance self-defense, although apparently not that kind of self-defense.Eva Galperin: The next step in your privacy journey is fighting back against types of corporate surveillance. And one of the things that websites really like to do is not just to track what you are doing on their website, but to track all the other websites that you go to. And they do this using cookies.Dr. Alok Patel: There's some companies I trust and I'm like, fine, you have these cookies. They're chocolate chip. I know where they're made. I know what you're doing with them. But then there's these third-party companies, I don't want them around me.Eva Galperin: You can use a browser extension to eat these cookies and fight back against this kind of tracking and keep those websites from seeing where else you're going.Dr. Alok Patel: Browser extensions are add-ons for your web browser that give it extra features and functionality, like eating cookies.I'm imagining this digital cookie monster that's eating up all these pieces of my online activity so that companies don't know what I'm doing online, and it reduces the amount of privacy tracking. Am I understanding that?Eva Galperin: What these browser extensions do is they get rid of the tracking cookies that these websites use to see all the other sites that you're going to, which is none of their business.

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How to make your data more private online

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