Before we dive into the raft of data privacy topics for 2022—and there will be plenty—let’s take a quick look at our five most popular blog posts from 2021 across both our blogs:
5 Ways to Make Best Use of your 9 Sudo Profiles
MySudo gives you up to 9 separate Sudo profiles which you can use to compartmentalize and protect your personal information, and limit your digital exhaust and the impact of surveillance capitalism on your life (having business track your activity across web sites and apps and use it for personalized ads and other forms of behavior influencing and profit taking).
To get the most benefit from MySudo, we outlined 5 clever strategies for maximizing your Sudos and it was our most popular article from 2021.
Apple’s New ATT Feature and Why Facebook is Hitting Back Hard
Over on our Anonyome Labs’ blog, we took a good look at one of Apple’s biggest news stories of 2021: its April introduction of the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, and specifically why Facebook took such issue with it. ATT puts data privacy up front in apps for the first time and gives users unprecedented control over their personal data. It forces apps to ask users whether they agree to the app tracking their activity across other companies’ apps and web sites. It’s pretty obvious why Facebook wouldn’t love the idea of limiting cross-app tracking (data is money after all), and the fallout was loud and global.
Interestingly, the numbers of users opting into cross-app tracking from apps that have displayed the in-app permission prompt remain low, at about 24% worldwide and 14% in the US.
Shocked or Not: Your Bank is Selling Your Personal Data
We all know the Facebooks and Googles of the world profit from our personal data (big time), but when we discussed banks doing the same thing (even worse to an extent, since they have so much data about our spending habits), plenty of you tuned in.
We told you how there’s a bit of role reversal going on, where Big Tech is moving more into banking and finance, and banks are moving more into the data economy, mining rich “data lakes” from our credit and debit card spending and our activity within loyalty programs. This is a good read if you want to understand what the banks are doing with your data and where the law is at in trying to stop them, plus what you can do yourself to stay safer.
7 Risks to Your Privacy from Back-to-School Shopping Online
When the new school year started in the Fall, we reminded parents of all the privacy and security pitfalls of the back-to-school online buying frenzy, such as being easily tracked online and having personal data, such as address and credit card number, caught in a data breach. This was understandably a popular read for many parents, but it applies just as well to any online shopper.
Online shopping is actually one of the most popular uses cases for MySudo because it allows users to use alternative secure personas or profiles called Sudos instead of their own personal data and dedicate a separate Sudo to each function they want to perform (e.g. shopping, booking travel, communicating with realtors etc.). This is a clever data protection strategy called compartmentalization. Take 90 seconds to explore MySudo.
A WhatsApp Scammer Targeted My Mom – The Story of Privacy Reformation
This story shocked because it not only highlighted the privacy and security issues of WhatsApp, but did so within the context of a user’s mom. None of us wants to see our moms or dads ill-treated. The writer describes how the incident with their mom led to their own privacy reformation.
There’s plenty you can do to proactively protect your data privacy. Here are 10 Big Privacy Compromises You Can Easily Fix with MySudo.
You might also like 9 Reasons Why Data Privacy Matters and why Even with all the Privacy Settings Maxed on Your Apple devices, You Still Need MySudo
