I keep on hearing privacy concerns with tech companies and I observe myself all the time. Some times it scares me that companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple know more things about me than I think I know about myself.
- The product you viewed on Amazon appears on the ad section of a website you browse next.
- A major keyword(like name, place, animal, thing) you are viewing on a website appears in Google instant when you start typing it.
- Tech giants like these can know your likes, dislikes and easily analyse your behavioural pattern. The suggestive ads you see on Facebook, across Internet are coming from your behaviour.
All these things are there, but last year a major scandal with Facebook came up. Facebook allowed a company called Cambridge Analytica to access millions of Facebook profiles without their consent and use it for political purposes. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook testified and apologised for this. AFAIK, this shook the whole FB community in a big way. But the allegations against Facebook didn't stop. It's reported that it paid teens to install a VPN app which spies on them without their knowledge. There is also this recent report which states over 540 million exposed data records are found on AWS servers.
Apple falls nothing short at this. Your iPhone gathers lots of your information. GPS, Siri records, directions your ask, the recipe you enquire - all of them directly go to Apple. There is also this recent famous FaceTime bug which allows you to listen to or even see the person on the other-end before they actually accept your call.
Google also tracks you all over. Recently, its CEO Sundar Pichai, also testified before US Congress for their political biased search results, tracking individual's location etc. He agreed that Google can look into the content of your Google Docs.
Not only them, in India, mobile network operators, Banks sell the user names and numbers to third party businesses without your consent. They make unwanted calls to you to sell their product. I am also a victim of these.
For me, these events made me talk about privacy invasions more and more. To be frank, it concerns me big time.