January 28th is celebrated as ‘Data Privacy Day’ every year. This is to bring more awareness to privacy issues that are constantly rising in our life. The more everything becomes digital and online, the more data we generate and the more data gets collected about us. This in turn is used by businesses, marketers and other malicious people to make a virtual persona of us or target advertisements based on our searches! It does feel extremely creepy when an invisible person is tracking us all the time and even make money off of this. How do we minimize it forms the rest of the content of this blog post:
Theme for the Data Privacy week and Data Privacy Day:
‘Data Privacy Week’ was celebrated from January 22 – 27 and the theme for this year’s Data Privacy Week was ‘Take control of your data’. This ‘Data Privacy Day’, let us try to follow the few points mentioned below to take control of our data and follow other privacy practices that will make our lives more safe online:
- Use privacy focused browsers like Brave, Mozilla Forefox, Tor Browser.
- Use privacy focused search engines like DuckDuckGo, Swisscows, Ecosia
- Keep track of what cookies you are giving consent to(when the pop-up comes for “Do you want to accept all cookies?”)
- ‘Location’ can be turned off most times except when needed
- It is good to read the privacy policy and fine print on all sites about what is being collected about you and what is shared with other third party companies. As an example, read about OneTrust’s privacy policy here
- You do have the right to unsubscribe from all marketing communications
- If you tinker around on a site, you can change cookie preferences and allow only what is needed
- EU and US(particularly the state of California) have more stringent privacy rules and laws. You can have the data that is collected about you to be deleted, forgotten or corrected.
Now, isn’t this a fantastic ‘Data Privacy Day’? 🙂
To top off our ‘Data Privacy Day’, here is a fun question:
Privacy Quiz
Have a safe, delightful fun Sunday! 🙂
It’s so difficult nowadays to maintain one’s security these days in the digital world.