Big Data and Machine Learning make protecting your online privacy even more challenging

Your personal details are safe only if the people you've shared it with also realize the importance. With the cost of computing power and storage drastically coming down, it's getting cheaper & easier for social media to entice you and your connected circle into revealing personal information to forward their commercial interests by breaching your trust.

image from Google Play

TrueCaller is a mobile app that will show you the name of a caller that's not already on your mobile contact list. The app's website claims that it is a collaborative  global phone directory with over 700 million numbers. Don't be surprised if your carefully guarded phone number is in their database. The novelty of finding the identity of an unknown caller may have suckered someone known to you to give away their contact list that includes your number.

Thanks to Big Data and Machine Learning, the individual datapoints (phone number, date of birth etc) can be aggregated to paint a more detailed picture of our real lives than any SSN or Driver’s License ever could.

It's a tragedy of our times that we are asked to use disposable email addresses, use fake names online, give bogus answers to security questions and use grammatically incorrect passphrases to beat grammar-aware password-cracking algorithm ('Andyhave3cats' is a better password than 'Shehave3cats') to protect our online privacy & security.

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Facebook Privacy Settings - important to review but generally ignored

A depiction of the Padmavyuha or 
Chakravyuha formation, from Wikipedia

Not understanding Facebook privacy settings before getting into it is like Abhimanyu landing into the Chakravyuh trap in the Mahabharata battle of Kurukshetra - it can lead to unsavory social consequences.

Like most teenagers of the previous generation who anxiously yearned to get a driving license when they turned 18, these days driven by peer pressure, teenagers eagerly look forward to turn 13 so that they can legally subscribe to Facebook.

The privacy settings are too many and in my opinion, purposely defined in a complicated way so that users don't bother with them and accept the default settings which are not in their best interest.

So for Facebook users, a little time spent reading about the Facebook Privacy Settings & implementing them can go a long way in protecting their online social reputation.

Also see: Don't let Chrome & Firefox remember your passwords on a shared computer

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