Anirudh Harshavardhan

Have you ever looked through a legal document? Like, really read through it? If you have, you have probably had to read and re-read the text several times, or actually have someone explain it to you. Privacy policies of companies online are more often than not very similar. Clauses upon clauses that drone on in legalese, and in convoluted – sometimes borderline misleading or evasive – language intended to steer you away from reading them. In this day and age, the more one reads the privacy policies of the online products and services they use, the better. Ideally, it’s great if you read the policies every time you download an app, it’s even better if you don’t need to install the app in the first place. The fewer apps  you download, the less you give your information away.

Many popular apps and services are ‘free’ in that you don’t have to pay to use them, but they cost you your personal data and privacy. These companies make their money by harvesting and selling user data to third parties that pay them. For example, if you install a simple third-party stopwatch or calculator app and it asks for permissions to use your phone’s camera, contacts, bluetooth or location, that’s definitely a red flag.

If you’re privacy conscious, it would help to look out for these things every time you use an online service:

• Look  for a link to their privacy policy page. If they don’t have one, or if nothing it says makes any sense to you, stay away from the app/service.
• Read their privacy policy and all the information they collect. Like we mentioned earlier, if a simple calculator or stopwatch app needs a ridiculous number of permissions, dump the app.
• See how the app shares your personal data. Exactly how do they comply with local law enforcement in terms of handing out your data. Do they try to provide personalised ad experiences? Do they share the data with third parties? What happens to your data if this company gets acquired by another company?

According to a study by pCloud, social media apps and food delivery apps are notorious for harvesting and selling large amounts of personal data. Facebook, Instagram and Messenger – all under the Meta umbrella – collect the most amount of user data. They even go so far as limiting app functionality if you just refuse to grant them permissions to any or all that they ask for. Similarly, streaming apps, dating apps, and food and other delivery apps also hoard massive amounts of data.

If you’re worried about services that you daily drive being invasive, such as emails, web browsers and streaming apps, then avoiding Google’s services is one way to go about it. Using more privacy-centric browsers such as Brave or Mozilla Firefox with extensions that are open source and vouched for will surely go a long way. You can’t be sure that your ISP (internet service provider) that you pay for doesn’t sell your data as a ‘side hustle.’ Fun fact: they do. So, doing things like procuring a paid VPN (virtual private network) service to mask your IP address, or altering your DNS in your network settings if you’re a bit more tech savvy, are sure shot ways of sidestepping these invasive practises tech companies employ.