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Give your online personal data a detox （790 words）
By Leslie Hook
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It is January, a popular time to cleanse. Faddish diets, purging the closet, exercise regimes — the new year has a way of encouraging these. But there is one potential resolution often overlooked: a digital detox.
I recently picked up a Data Detox Kit that one of my roommates had left in the living room. The kit, a small, square box containing instructions that are also available to download online, is produced by two non-profits, the Tactical Technology Collective, a Berlin group focused on tech tools for advocacy, and Mozilla, builder of the Firefox browser.
Its aim is not to divorce you from technology but rather to help you manage privacy settings and any personal data that may be floating around online. The eight-day programme promised to help me cut down on toxic data build-up and reduce “data bloat”.
“Do you feel like your digital self is slipping out of control,” the kit’s website asks. “Have you let yourself install too many apps, clicked ‘I agree’ a few too many times, lost track of how many accounts you’ve created?”
Yep, I thought, that sounds like me. Afterwards I would feel lighter and more in control, the kit assured.
Like any detox fad, the promises seemed a bit too good to be true, and I started off as a sceptic. As a technology reporter I already knew that my phone and apps were tracking my every move. (Like many millennials, I do not particularly have a problem with that.) So what if Facebook knows I have a cold and shows me cough medicine advertisements? That has never bothered me too much.
As I started to undertake the data detox however, I was genuinely surprised at the extent of the information that companies had collected about me.
On day one, the kit teaches me that Google does not only maintain a “location history” of my movements. It also uses this to estimate where my photos were taken and stores this information with each picture. In Google photos, the facial recognition capabilities mean that when I type in “mom” or “dad”, the algorithm accurately picks out photos of my parents.
The good news is that these settings (and more) can be changed. After a couple of minutes spent going through Google’s privacy checklist, which is, admittedly, clear and helpful, I did indeed start to feel more in control.
Day two of the detox turned to another data giant: Facebook. The kit shows you where to find out “what Facebook thinks you like”; in other words, the labels that Facebook has assigned based on your activity, which it then uses to target advertising. These range from the very broad (interested in “politics”) to the very specific. In my case Facebook correctly guessed that I share an apartment and travel frequently.
This was kind of creepy but later in the detox, as the cleanse grew more intense, the types of data exposed became more intimate. On day six, the kit helps you to request your personal data from data brokers, those companies that scoop up the information we scatter online and sell it to marketers. I learnt that the broker knew my birthday, salary range and how much I spent on clothing in a year. It is possible to edit this data but not to opt out entirely.
The final days of the programme explore the ways in which your digital identity can be what you make it. While many of the tips in the first part of the detox are practical — such as switching to search engines that will not collect your data — the suggestions in the last two days become more extreme.
Create multiple online personas that are not linked to each other, it recommends, so that they can be compartmentalised for different purposes. Use tricks to confuse advertising companies, such as changing your timezone on social media accounts and “liking” random things to throw off Facebook’s algorithms. To add to the noise, use a browser extension that will constantly run fake searches to hide whatever you are actually searching for.
These guerrilla tactics feel a little less useful than the rest of the programme. Perhaps it was detox fatigue setting in, but these final exercises made me realise that using my real identity online is actually very useful for most of what I do on the internet.
Still, like any good detox, it was nice to walk away from the programme feeling more educated about my personal data and how to control it. Achieving total privacy online may still be something of a chimera for the layperson. But it feels good to take back even a little bit of control. At least Google is no longer tracking photos of my parents.
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