There is a well-known Chinese proverb that says “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.” This saying applies to many areas of life, and it also applies to privacy. The last few decades have seen a dramatic increase in the depth and breadth of privacy invasions from Big Tech companies. This increase tracks with the increase in smartphone usage, because what better way to invade someone’s privacy than with an always-on, always-connected computer full of sensors that people carry with them wherever they go? Few people took active steps to protect their privacy 20 years ago, but the second best time to protect your privacy is now. If you care about your privacy, what should you do, right now?
Privacy Twenty Years Ago
While there were plenty of privacy advocates sounding the alarm about the surveillance practices of Big Tech companies 20 years ago, their warnings about where these incremental increases in tracking would lead went largely unheeded. At the time people were just starting to take advantage of the capabilities of the smartphones in their pocket to share their pictures, their activities, and their location on social media using apps largely funded by advertisements. Smartphone app permissions weren’t that fine-grained and developers often just asked for full permissions. Tracking cookies, Big Tech cloud accounts, unique phone identifiers and plugins injected into major websites started allowing Big Tech companies to track everything an individual did on the majority of the Internet. They then combined it with search histories and third party databases (such as financial records) to build accurate profiles about them.
For many it was hard to believe that all of this data would be stored in massive databases, combined with other databases, and then used for targeted ads. Others
— source puri.sm | Kyle Rankin | May 13, 2022