Wednesday, March 26, 2014

It’s a Jungle Out There—Protect Yourself

An article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention. It was written in Give Me Back My Privacy,These days, it seems privacy is under assault from all sides. Your phone can track your location, your thermostat learns your personal habits, Facebook knows the most intimate details about your life—and U.S. intelligence agencies are racing to sweep up reams of data.”

With every swipe, click and login, people are sharing ever-growing amounts of information about themselves. But now we're getting tired of the consequences and we're starting to fight back.

I understand that when I go to certain websites that cookies are gathering data. I delete them every few months and figure it is just part of the Internet. What I didn’t know is that “bricks and mortar” are trying to level the playing field and wireless technology—my cell phone—is giving them the means to do it.

My cell phone is sending a signal locating precisely where I am in the store. It is transmitted when I stop to look at the coffee, bread or expensive olives. Nordstrom’s received negative feedback from their customers and abandoned the program, but many other retailers are gathering everything they can about my shopping habits. They justify it, so they say, by giving me tangible incentives like targeted coupons. I discovered how to escape from their jungle. If I turn off the Wi-Fi on my phone before I shop, it doesn’t transmit a signal of my whereabouts.

I am also tired of being inundated with spam email that “mysteriously” appears after I visit a website looking for something like a recipe for ginger cookies. Immediately I begin to receive ads for new cookie sheets or weight loss fads. Now I know how to stop websites from collecting information about me.
 
Today’s gift is to share that knowledge with you, my friends. A free program called AVG Privacy Fix can be downloaded here. It will analyze your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and fix your privacy settings. Plus, it puts an icon on your browser allowing you to opt out of ads on each website that are collecting information about you! AVG clearly states that they are not setting cookies or selling my information. At this time, it only works on Google Chrome, Firefox, Android and IOS. We face enough lions and tigers and bears each day that we can’t control, but AVG can protect us from whatever lurks in the shadows.

In Giving,

Robin

No comments:

Post a Comment