Eight ways that your data can be used or abused by third parties

The perils of leaving the privacy of your data in third party hands

Facebook alerts 14M to privacy bug that changed status composer to public

The eight ways that your data may be used or abused by third parties

1. Used for converting prospects into leads for future businesses
2. Target advertisement (most are upfront on this), see Google Adsense
3. Resold to other parties, see previous post on unimania
4. Data ex-filtration (hacked) by attackers, see MyHeritage data breach
5. Seized officially by Government or law enforcement agencies
6. Used as data source to seed another business, see Hola and Luminati and TrueCaller
7. Pure scams to get personal information, e.g. fake job offering
8. Used to build up individual or group databases for future espionage or influence operation

Who should be responsible for your data?

Delegating the tasks of protecting your personal data to third parties is a risk. In this modern world, some of these tasks may have to be "outsourced". Understanding the above risks will help you in deciding whether a company or organisation require your data and how they are going to protect it. A simple privacy statement does not tell you how strong or weak is their data protection mechanism. And most privacy page have a clause to state any future use of data is at their discretion.

While most people are sensitive about credit cards or payment details, they are less concern about the voluntary disclosure of personal details in their social accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram ...). We hope this post will remind readers the perils of trusting third parties on protection of their data.

Secret Notes AES-256

For keeping sensitive data in your Android phone, we recommend our own Secret Notes AES-256. This app requires no permission and does not connect to any external servers.

Follow us on all critical Android development and security news here.