Privacy Blog

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 Andy Yen- Think Your Email's Private? Think Again

https://www.ted.com/talks/andy_yen_think_your_email_s_private_think_again?language=en

    Andy Yen expresses how emails alone can contain a lot of data and information about a person. Emails contain information like where you've been, who you've met, and who you're thinking about. A scary idea that he mentioned is that our data will outlive us and will be available forever. He made the analogy that sending an email is like sending a postcard. This means that anyone who sees it from the time it leaves your computer to the time it gets to the recipient can read the whole letter. 

    Companies utilize the data we provide and depend a lot of their revenue on ad-revenue. Some of the top companies like Facebook and Google rely on over half of the revenue on ad-revenue. Yen says that the only way to breakdown this lack of privacy issue is to get the whole world involved. That seems like a very big task considering a lot of major companies and the government benefit from using our data and are not going to want to give that up. 

    Yen suggests using private encryption software to fix some of the privacy issues. The ProtonMail is used to send messages to anyone without the threat of anyone other than the recipient seeing it. The encryption and software run behind the scenes and are not difficult or disruptive to the user. A quarter of a million people have already signed up for ProtonMail and it's coming from all over the world. This shows that this is a major problem, not just in the U.S., but in the world. 


    I've always heard of and known of the privacy issues that are increasingly becoming worse. However, I never was really that concerned about it because I had always had the mindset of "what do I have to hide?".  After learning more about how companies benefit from stealing information from consumers without them knowing, I have become more adamant about sharing information online. Not only is it scary, but it is wrong. 






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