Welcome to “opt out”. This is a semi-regular column about how to take control of your online privacy and say no to surveillance. In my last column, I discussed how to talk to your family about not posting pictures of your baby online.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to carry out the largest mass deportation of illegal immigrants in U.S. history, and many rights groups believe he will continue to threaten the broader immigrant community, even through legal steps. They fear that they will introduce or reinstate targeted regulations on undocumented individuals, as well as asylum seekers and refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries, if past actions are any indication. More information.More information.
Civil liberties groups are bracing for how this will affect the privacy and data security of immigrants across the country. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is already looking to expand its surveillance network and is seeking new contracts to add to the agency’s ankle monitoring system. According to Wired.
There are few protections against the state surveillance apparatus that has been used by every recent administration to surveil the American people and will likely continue to be used under the Trump administration. The United States has no federal privacy regulations on the books that effectively limit how companies collect personal data and what they can do with that data. Tech companies have been aggressively competing for national security and government contracts to boost profits for years, and now with renewed fervor.
“Digital security can feel overwhelming because it feels like there’s so much to do,” says Lucal. “Tech companies, law enforcement, and immigration authorities should assume they can access everything they can message, post, search, read, and watch online if they want. But how can we make it even more difficult for them? there is.”
The following tips are not exhaustive, but are some of the top recommendations from Just Futures Act and other organizations for asylum seekers or immigrants concerned about protecting their privacy. As a general rule of thumb, you should minimize the amount of data you store or share, be especially careful with apps that share your location, and consider deleting the data if possible.
delete message
Let's start with messaging. For many of the privacy concerns we've addressed in the past, like ensuring your messages aren't used to train AI or protecting your child's photos, one of the most important strategies to protect your privacy is One is: Use encrypted messaging. This is one of the first steps in data minimization that Lucal suggests to immigrants. In the simplest terms, this means that messages are only accessible by the sender and recipient. Even the company running the messaging service doesn't have access to your texts, making it extremely difficult to pass these messages on to third parties such as snooping government agencies or immigration authorities.
signal: Most professionals prefer Signal not only because it is end-to-end encrypted but also because it is run by a nonprofit organization with little financial incentive to collect and share data with third parties or governments. Recommended. Another reason Signal works so well is that you can: Set messages to be automatically deleted After a certain period of time, Lucal highly recommends this. You can do this for each individual chat,…
Source: www.theguardian.com
