We have a lot of personal data exposed in the cyber world in our daily life. To name a few, the “intrusive components” are:
- Electronic pass for toll road: where you are heading to, or even your entire journey if throughout the itinerary, there are traffic cameras and auto toll collection points
- CCTV: inside building, public areas, dashcam in vehicles nearby
- Credit card: traces back to your identify, location, amount consumed, commodity purchased
- Health monitoring device: you wear in your body to capture your health data continuously, share in the technology provider’s community if you wish
- Operating System: sharing the diagnostic data with the technology vendor when problem occurs or during online trouble shooting
- Web site cookies: IP address to geo-location of your web surfing location, your web preference
- Digital photo: modern cameras are equipped with geo-tagging
The most intrusive device is your cell phone. You carry it almost all the time. It exposes your geo-location from which cell towers your phone is connecting to.
What should I do? The “safest” is to stay off grid but this is impractical in the life style we are already enjoying. The bottom line is to understand what will be captured, how to disable the sharing and decide usage per individual needs.
An example is to turn on your phone only when you need it at the cost of being unreachable by your contacts at other times.