Throwing Privacy Out the Window

Source: Lifehacker, by Thorin Klosowski

I am an extremely private person. I don’t broadcast my location, I use privacy tools to keep advertisers from tracking me, and almost never give any app access to Facebook. Of course, a lot of people don’t have a problem with living publicly. I’ve always wondered what the benefits and downfalls of doing so are, so I decided to give it a three-week test run. Here’s how it went.

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of your privacy because your data is often used for ads you don’t know about, logged in databases you’ve never heard of, and used to find out where you are and what you’re doing. Some of the things I consider “radical public living” experiments are probably commonplace to you, but even so, my experience may give you a better insight into what you’re gaining—and potentially losing—with your choices. Let’s start by looking at my experiences with location-sharing every move I made and then move on to the data collected by my browser. Finally, we’ll close by handing all this information over to a third party and seeing what type of demographic picture gets formed.