Big tech is making some big moves on your personal information.
Now, they’re making it look good by dressing it up with some fun statistics. For example, Spotify Unwrapped gives you a list of all the music you’ve listened to the most in the past year. Google Maps has a similar function. It compiles a neat list of all the countries, cities, and places you’ve visited.
It’s time to call this out for what it is: they’re showing you all the personal information they’ve gathered from you, and are keeping it in their systems.
Your location data is critical information. We’ve seen journalists, politicians, and gamers doxxed for one thing or the other on the internet.
In this episode, Alexander and Jason discuss how a Catholic priest was outed by a Christian publication. This happened because they tracked his location using Grindr, and found that he was visiting gay bars and private residence from 2018 to 2020. They concluded that it was his phone based on the location data as well.
“A mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities.” - The Pillar
That’s highly specialized location data. Three years of the priest’s whereabouts, being logged and stored by the app. And a data vendor was all it took to ruin his entire life.
Should he have been a priest if he was a closeted homosexual? That’s not what we’re trying to answer here. The core of this issue is that someone tracked this individual’s private choices and exposed them without their consent, without them even being aware that they were tracked in the first place.
Those fun end-of-the-year summaries on your app activity aren’t for free. They are blatantly telling you that you are the product, and you can have your data weaponized against you without your knowledge. That’s the kind of chaotic world we can expect with the inevitable weaponization of data.
This is a wake-up call for you to start being more vigilant about who and where you share your data. You need to own the information you create on your gadgets. Those are your personal assets and you worked hard to create them.
With TARTLE, you can take that information into your hands and choose to share it on your time, at your pace. Stop letting third parties and vendors take that away from you. Your choice, your time, your data.
Sign up for TARTLE here.
