The simple answer to this questions is YES! Is it a stupid question to ask.? May be. Privacy should be extremely important and valuable to us. Where we fall pray is the desire of free services. Free movies, free podcasts, free blogs, free social media, free chats and so on. If you think you can get something for free, you are mistaken. Everything comes at a price, you like it or not.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Services that we seen an desire all run at a monetory cost for the providers. These costs are inccured for quality and availability of the service primarily. These services are no charity. They are a business and a business will always focus on profits. Does it spark a question in your mind? How do these service pay for the quality and availability?

There are a few methods to make money for the services. The top two that come to my mind are, consumer fee and ads. I believe that a consumer fee is the honest way of making money. Platforms like Netflix is one such example. You need to pay for your favourite movie or series. No freebies! Ads are another way which is the most popular method for services to make money. Ads ain’t something new. Back in the day, when Radio and Television where the growing source of entertainment, Ads were the primary source of making money for providers, aside from taking a consumer fee. Well Ads ain’t an attack on our privacy. It’s a means for other business to tell us about their latest products or services. The attack on our privacy is the desire to make these Ads personalised.

Personalized Ads is the new tred in Advertising. This is how services can gain the most profits from Ads. The only way to make Ads personalised is to track your identity over the internet, through your searches, what you read, what you share, what you talk about, etc. This is a breach to our privacy. Some services take it a notch higher and sell personally identifiable information like contact numbers, addresses, etc. to further the cause for personalised ads.

Were you in the illusion that everything you did using the internet was private? Haha! That’s a joke. Our activity on the internet has never been private. We always have services like google, facebook tracking us around for collecting information. These attacks on privacy isn’t new in 2021. The privacy movement started long back.

What do we do as users of the internet? Here are a few things that I do:

1. Have clarity of the information that is private for you and what is okay to be shared. This really depends on person to person. A simple example is Birthday. Some folks like to keep it private like me. Others are okay to share it.
2. Understand the privacy policy of services you use. Well, I don’t mean the that you should read every word of the privacy policy of each and every service that you use, but it’s important to know it briefly. This also help you stay away from fake news and rumous.
3. Beware of sharing information over the internet. You can’t run away from the fact that there are times we need to share information over the internet, for customer services, in groups, etc. But it’s importatn to verify the channel before sharing and to share only what’s essential to be shared.

Being a Certified Information Security Expert, I know that there is so much that goes around the internet that it’s very difficult to keep your privacy protected. The more I think about it the more I am scared. But internet has become an essential service in this day and age and we are heavily dependant on internet. I do my best with the 3 steps I mentioned. When will you get serious about your privacy?

I love free services, but not at the cost of my privacy.