Guest Author: Kirsten Mast
Safety protocols
It’s back-to-school time, and millions of parents remind their kids about the family safety plans. We quiz them on who will pick them up if mom or dad is unavailable. We practice finding and using the spare key. Schools hold drills; fire, earthquake, hurricane, or active shooter. Decades ago, in a safer America, I remember hearing this call: “Close the door! You weren’t raised in a barn!” Can you imagine leaving your front door wide open? Yet, even today, many of us are missing something this obvious.
We know things in different ways. Knowing something intellectually is different from knowing it by experience. Generally, experience with a threat makes us more vigilant. When my oldest son was about five, we lived in an old farmhouse, which we heated with a wood stove. Fire safety was part of his daily life. In case of a house fire, he knew to meet at the mailbox; he could open his window and use the fire escape ladder. He loved practicing fire drills! It was exciting.
Then, things changed drastically. He often chatted about what he saw out the window while riding in the car. An older, steeply gabled house near my work fascinated him; he nicknamed it “the pointy, green house.” One day, as we passed by, all that was standing was the chimney amid a pile of black, charred remains. He was horrified! “What happened to the pointy, green house, Mom?” I explained that there was a house fire. I thought this was no different than explaining our fire safety plans at home. But the experience of seeing a burned-down house suddenly made all the fire safety lessons matter to him.
For weeks afterward, he checked the fireplace at home and the fire escape ladder in his room. He asked about the smoke alarms and prayed daily that our house would not burn down. For all of us, experiences can suddenly make seemingly remote possibilities meaningful. Without waiting for a scary experience, adults are better at taking precautions.
Unlocked doors
For example, house fires only occur in only 0.25% of homes in an average year in America, but almost all homes have smoke detectors. Interestingly, in 2024 it is over 10 times as likely that your home will be burglarized (a 2.7% chance). While, home security systems decrease the risk by half, only 38% of us have security systems.
More shockingly, only 75% of Americans even lock our front door. How can this be? Some “no-lock” folks explain that a determined burglar will get in anyway, and the break-in cost is lower if you don’t have to replace windows and doors.
Others point out that their town is safe, so they don’t need to worry. Still others say their house is nondescript and wouldn’t likely be a target. But, locking the front door is about more than security. It declares our right to privacy.
Perhaps these folks recognize that even closing the door is a powerful privacy protection because we generally trust each other not to walk into other people’s homes.
Wide-open doors
The same is NOT true online. Casually browsing the internet is the virtual equivalent of leaving your door wide open, not just unlocked. Would you feel okay if you came home to an open door, with your stuff moved around, but nothing stolen?
If you don’t close the door to your internet browsing, it is guaranteed that someone is metaphorically sifting through your underwear drawer, reading the spines on your books, browsing your medicine cabinet, and sorting through the food in your pantry.
When you use Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Meta products and services, you actively agree to let them snoop. You might think that this is just the price of being online, that it is too inconvenient to keep them out, or that their invasion of your privacy does no actual harm.
You might be thinking like the no-lock homeowners, but the privacy risk with our online behavior is exponentially higher than the privacy risk of leaving your front door wide open. If someone wanders through your house physically, what information might they find? Your unpaid bills? Password-protected computers? Credit cards? Your prescriptions?
This house-wanderer may not know how to use this data, but technology providers do. They are in the business of collecting and using our data. While we and our kids casually browse YouTube, scan Instagram, scroll through X, and sift through Facebook or shop on Amazon, our service providers gather every keystroke, every pause in the scrolling, and every tap to create incredibly accurate profiles for each of us.
The insidious part is what happens once they know who we are, what we think, what we like, and what we want.
With a few tweaks to their algorithms, tech companies can convince us to buy things we don’t need and manipulate what information we see until our views change to fit their intentions. It works with adults and is even more effective with kids. Consider these privacy risks for minors:
- Storage of their learning data, including thinking characteristics, learning trajectory, engagement scores, response times, pages read, and videos viewed
- Storage of their movement times and locations
- Carefully targeted advertising directed at children who are not yet able to differentiate fiction from reality
- Cancellation of their views, online posts that follow them into adulthood, including college admissions affected by online views and activities
- Identity theft can destroy their credit while they’re still minors
Besides all this, providers also sell and share this data with third-party advertisers, partners and affiliates, and with government agencies. This is the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of people wandering through your house every day, rearranging a few things, taking pictures of others, and then walking back out,
Close the Door!
Every one of us has heard of privacy browsers and we all know there’s a way to change our settings to stop some of the snooping, but few take action. Are you waiting for a neighbor's house to burn down or be burglarized? Do you not believe the threat is real?
If you are willing to close and lock your door and check the batteries on your smoke alarm, perhaps it’s time to take a few steps to address a much more likely threat: the monetization and distribution of your data.
Maybe it’s time to close the wide-open door that allows tech companies to peer into every corner of your life. Perhaps you could start by installing a private browser like Brave, DuckDuckGo, or Vivaldi.
Maybe it’s time to buy an Unplugged UP Phone so your location won’t be tracked. Along with other back-to-school safety classes, you can teach your kids the importance of browsing privately as part of their online safety.
The key is to remember that you have the power to protect yourself and your family, both in the physical and digital worlds. By taking steps to protect your online privacy, such as using private browsers and privacy-oriented devices, you can regain control and ensure your digital safety.
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