MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — It’s been a rough year. And the beating involves more than stock market fluctuations and political divisiveness. 2018 has been marked as a year filled with a breakdown in privacy protections, and with that, consumer confidence in the electronic tools that shape and run our digital world.
Bev Mo, Marriott, T-Mobile, Orbitz, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Google — it seemed on any given week, a large firm was having to report a vulnerability in its users’ accounts, profiles and other valuable information sometimes years after the fact.
“One optimistic thing to take away from this is the public is becoming more aware of these attacks when sharing on a platform,” Electronic Frontier Foundation spokeswoman Alexis Hancock told Patch. “The upside is people are paying attention.”
The San Jose-based nonprofit founded in 1990 thrives as a consumer watchdog in the digital world. EFF champions user privacy, free expression and innovation. It’s known to ensure rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as the use of technology grows.
To Hancock, the unfortunate aspect of our breach-and-leach way of life is the mere idea that “a lot of people have resigned themselves” to thinking these bad actors already “know everything about us.” The concern among watchdog groups like EFF lies in whether computer users will become complacent, surrender to their surroundings and lack the due diligence to take action against the bottom feeders of the electronic world.
Hancock’s suggestion? Go public. This means turn to government to enact laws like the California Data Protection Act to legally force companies to protect our information.
“In 2019, there are more talks around legislation. We can’t just trust anymore these companies are going to protect us. Bills need to be presented,” she said.
For now, Hancock advises users on computer devices to forego the no-password-necessary wifi networks companies like Starbucks offer their patrons as a convenience benefit. The scary part is the nice-enough looking person sitting at the table next to you could be learning more about you than you’d care to share.
“At some point, consumers need to start asking for passwords,” she said.
Another stopgap measure Hancock recommends revolves around a revolving door of passwords.
“They need to make sure their passwords are not stale,” she said, emphasizing how hacking culprits can learn about people by paying attention to what they share.
This boils down to delaying vacation pictures on social media until one returns from a trip. The declaration of a fun time miles away from home is an open door for someone to do more than hack into a computer.
Many of these measures have been said before, and Hancock has seen a level of weariness from those hearing them over and over again. The defeatist in all of us is prompting some people to even downgrade to low-tech forms of communication.
It’s because the consequences of current trends can be quite serious.
Beyond Starwood Marriott’s 500 million guests who laid down their trust with the hotelier’s fire wall, a few companies responsible for Business Insiders’ 21 “scariest” breaches reside in the Silicon Valley.
Mountain View-based Google, Alphabet’s search engine division, discovered in November that 52.5 million users’ profiles on Google+ were compromised on such a large scale the behemoth decided to shut down the auxiliary service permanently by next April.
Often in the hot seat, Menlo Park-based Facebook was in and out of the news more times than it would ever want to be because of breaches in its social media system in which hackers exploited weaknesses in Facebook’s code to retrieve what are called “access tokens.” These measurements are essentially digital keys to sift through users’ accounts.
Facebook had even set up a “War Room” to protect the system from foreign entities known through intelligence agencies to have influenced the 2016 presidential election and were taking aim with 2018’s midterms. Pages upon pages were removed as illegitimate users were trying to pass off false information as factual.
Facebook’s public relations department told Patch that it upped the ante in 2018, doubling the number of people who work on security and safety issues to more than 30,000, including content reviewers, systems engineers and security experts.
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Facebook released its own set of tips to make users’ data more secure:
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