A helpful tool for maintaining perspective in these areas is to apply the grandmother test. What’s that? Before posting a message or comment on any online forum, take a minute to read it over one or two more times and then ask yourself, “Would both my grandmothers approve of what I’ve written? Is there anything that would make them uncomfortable?” In other words, ask yourself whether anyone could reasonably feel threatened or bullied by what you’re about to publish. The bottom line is to make generous use of common sense and goodwill.
With typical attention to such details, the social media community has come up with new names to describe each of the nastiest online threats. You should, unfortunately, be familiar with each of them.
Cyberstalking Stalking isn’t specific to online activities, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening. In general terms, a stalker persistently follows and observes a target, often with the goal of forcing an unwanted reaction. In the online world, cyberstalking can include electronic monitoring of a target’s online accounts and activities. Harassing cyberstalking can escalate beyond mere monitoring to include threats, slander, and identity theft.
Cybermobbing Mobbing involves large groups of people banding together to engage in bullying behavior. The nature of many social networking platforms—in particular the prevalence of anonymous accounts and the ease by which users can connect to each other—lends itself to mob formation. Often, all it can take is a single public post expressing an unpopular position and the power of tens of thousands of users can be brought to bear with the goal of making life miserable for the post’s author.
Doxxing Whether you present yourself to the online world using your real name or through an anonymous identity, you certainly don’t want your complete personal profile to become public. Considering all the data that’s already available on the internet, it’s often not hard for people with time on their hands to track down your physical address and private phone numbers. But making such information easily available on popular social media sites with the intention of causing the target harm is wrong—and, in some jurisdictions, also a crime. Victims of public doxxing have experienced relatively mild annoyances like middle-of-the-night pizza deliveries. But the practice has also proven deadly: it’s been used as part of “swatting” attacks, where people call a victim’s local police department claiming there’s a violent crime in progress at the victim’s address. More than one doxxer has been imprisoned for what must have seemed like a clever prank.
Protecting Digital Privacy
Your primary concern must always be to secure the data under your control. But have you ever wondered why that is? What’s the worst that could happen if copies of your data are stolen. After all, you’ll still have the originals, right? Well, if your organization is in the business of profiting from innovations and complex, hard-to-reproduce technology stacks, then the consequences of data theft are obvious. But even if your data contains nothing more than private and personal information, there’s a lot that can go wrong.
Let’s explore all that by way of posing a few questions.
What Is Personal Data?
Your personal data is any information that relates to your health, employment, banking activities, close relationships, and interactions with government agencies. In most cases, you should have the legal right to expect that such information remains inaccessible to anyone without your permission.
But “personal data” could also be anything that you contributed with the reasonable expectation that it would remain private. That could include exchanges of emails and messages or recordings and transcripts of phone conversations. It should also include data—like your browser search history—saved to the storage devices used by your compute devices.
Governments, citing national interest concerns, will reserve the right for their security and enforcement agencies to forcibly access your personal data where legally required. Of course, different governments will set the circumstances defining “legally required” according to their own standards. When you disagree, some jurisdictions permit legal appeal.
Where Might My Personal Data Be Hanging Out?
The short answer to that question is “Probably a whole lot of places you wouldn’t approve.” The long answer will begin with something like “I can tell you, but expect to become and remain deeply stressed and anxious.” In other words, it won’t be pretty. But since you asked, here are some things to consider.
Browsing Histories
The digital history of the sites you’ve visited on your browser can take more than one form. Your browser can maintain its own log of the URLs of all the pages you’ve opened. Your browser’s cache will hold some of the actual page elements (like graphic images) and state information from those websites. Online services like Google will have their own records of your history, both as part of the way they integrate your various online activities and through the functionality of website usage analyzers that might be installed in the code of the sites you visit.
Some of that data will be anonymized, making it impossible to associate with any one user, and some is, by design, traceable. A third category is meant to be anonymized but can, in practice, be decoded by third parties and traced back to you. Given the right (or wrong) circumstances, any of that data can be acquired by criminals and used against your interests.
Ecommerce and Social Media Account Data
Everything you’ve ever done on an online platform—every comment you’ve posted, every password you’ve entered, every transaction you’ve made—is written to databases and, at some point, used for purposes you didn’t anticipate. Even if there was room for doubt in the past, we now know with absolute certainty that companies in possession of massive data stores will always seek ways to use them to make money. In many cases, there’s absolutely nothing negative or illegal about that. As an example, it can’t be denied that Google has leveraged much of its data to provide us with mostly free services that greatly improve our lives and productivity.
But there are also concerning aspects to the ways our data is used. Besides the possibility that your social media or online service provider might one day go “dark side” and abuse their access to your data, many of them—perhaps most infamously, Facebook—have sold identifiable user data to external companies. An even more common scenario has been the outright theft of private user data from insufficiently protected servers. This is something that’s already happened to countless companies over the past few years. Either way, there’s little you can do to even track, much less control, the exciting adventures your private data may be enjoying—and what other exotic destinations it might reach one, five, or ten years down the road.
Government Databases
National and regional government agencies also control vast stores of data covering many levels of their citizens’ behavior. We would certainly hope that such agencies would respect their own laws governing the use of personal data, but you can never be sure that government-held data will never be stolen—or shared with foreign agencies that aren’t bound by the same standards. It also isn’t rare for rogue government agencies or individual employees to abuse their obligations to you and your data.
Public Archives
The internet never forgets. Consider that website you quickly threw together a decade ago as an expression of your undying loyalty to