Sometimes when I ask someone “do you think your privacy is safe?” The answer in general is “no”. This is a common and normal response, but what worries me the most is what people often say afterwards “I don’t have anything to hide either.” After hearing this phrase, I say the following “if so, leave me your mobile phone for just five minutes.” Hearing this, people immediately say that no, then something, no matter how little, they have to keep or protect.
We are clear that our privacy is important, technology advances so fast that some of us go as fast as it, but there are many people who do not. A few months ago I did a little experiment with a 13-year-old teenager and her parents. In the young woman’s educational center, they use Google services for everything (Gmail, Google Drive, ChromBook…). It is not the only educational center that uses this method of work, the vast majority use this way of working, I thought that the result that I could obtain from this young woman, could be obtained from many and many more students.
With the permission of the parents of the 13-year-old student, the four of us met with the girl’s computer. In this case, it was not necessary that it was the computer that she uses in her educational center, since her Gmail account, the one she uses when she studies, can be used on any computer, but her personal one, cannot be used on the Chrombook computer.
We turn on his personal computer and go to the following URL: https://myactivity.google.com/ (Google my activity). On this website, we can see three categories. On the one hand, what Google records about us about the things we search on the Internet, what we search and see on YouTube and where we have been geographically. When we accessed this address using the Gmail account that this girl uses in her educational center, we realized that of these three categories, one had activated, two of them were deactivated, the only one that had activated was those of the YouTube searches.
The general result was that neither the student herself nor her parents knew about this, in their educational center, they had not been informed of this. When her mother found out and saw all this, she did the same with her personal mobile phone. In her case, she had all three categories activated. We analyzed the information saved from the geolocation, in total, 5 years of information recorded daily about her movements, she immediately, she asked me to delete everything.
I deleted all registered information of the mother and daughter, but how many underage students can be in this situation? If you use Gmail and your sons and daughters use Gmail in their educational center, access the Googlemyactivity link and delete everything you can and then deactivate the categories. To prevent Google from saving all this information, when you access any Google product, you have to “Close session”, otherwise, it will record everything you do on the Internet, be it PC, mobile or tablet. If a third person accesses that device another day, they can see everything you are looking for, and that is private information.
There is no doubt that this is a general problem in our society, therefore, my advice is that you use services such as ProtonMail, all your information will be protected and encrypted, no one will have access, only the user has access to the information.
