Opinion I was going to write a story about how Amazon is no longer even pretending to respect your privacy. But, really, why bother?
What do I mean by that? Well, take, for example, that recently, Amazon announced a significant change in its Alexa device privacy policy. Starting March 28, 2025, Amazon will remove the option to process Alexa voice requests locally on specific Echo devices. Instead, all voice recordings will be sent to the cloud for processing, a move intended to support Amazon's new generative AI features in Alexa Plus.
I'd find that very scary, except, well, you see, I already reported that security flaws in Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablets could potentially be exploited to snoop on every last Amazon device in your home. With security like this, were Amazon gadgets ever trustworthy?
But then, what is?
For instance, there was the National Public Data (NPD) breach in 2024. This catastrophic incident exposed the sensitive personal information of nearly 2.9 billion US, Canadian, and British citizens. This included their Social Security Numbers, addresses, and birth dates. The breach led to NPD's bankruptcy.
Then there was the UnitedHealth Group ransomware attack, which compromised the data of more than 100 million individuals. The company paid a substantial ransom to attackers, but is the data "safe"? Who knows. I doubt very much UnitedHealth does.
On top of this, Chinese spies were involved in the Salt Typhoon attacks, which compromised at least nine US telecommunications networks. These attacks allowed China to access communications from high-ranking US officials, including President Donald Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Oh, and potentially you and me as well.
How bad has Salt Typhoon been? We don't know. The Trump administration disbanded the US Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), which had been investigating it. Recently, however, the government has decided to reconstitute the CSRB.
Mind you, this is the same government that decided to sic the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on all government agencies in search of fraud without a single forensic accountant to its name. Instead, these Musk groupies seek to copy sensitive data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and pretty much all other government departments. How will our private data be protected? We don't know. Privacy is not a priority for the current American administration.
Finally, the genetics research and genealogy company 23andMe has just announced it's going bankrupt. What will happen to the DNA records of 15 million people, including yours? Darned if I know. It all depends on the buyer. California's attorney general is advising people with 23andMe accounts to delete their data.
Mind you, even if you zap your information, some of your data will linger. I'm just glad I don't have any strong genetic traits for any pre-existing conditions that would make health insurance companies think twice before writing a policy for me.
Now, on top of all this data just lying around out there getting easier and easier to obtain, we have AI vacuuming up all our data to make it easier than ever to track our every move.
Sure, there are efforts afoot to better protect our privacy. This includes government regulations, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and America's California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which seeks to ensure that companies handle personal data responsibly. Whatever that means.
And there are many things you can do to protect your privacy. Edward Snowden – remember him? – had some useful suggestions on how to shield yourself back in 2015, and they're still helpful today.
Frankly, it's too late to put the privacy genie back in the bottle. The best you can do is reduce how public you make your life. For example, with not quite a million CCTV cameras in London, or about one camera for every ten people, you don't want to live there if you object to being surveilled. In the online world, if you don't wish to have online snoopers tracking you, you don't want to spend time on heavily monitored social networks such as Facebook and X.
The bottom line is you can't avoid some exposure these days. For example, your smartphone is constantly tracking you. The best you can do is minimize your exposure by turning off location tracking services. If you're serious about protecting your privacy from your smartphone, you can switch to privacy-first mobile operating systems such as e/OS.
I could give far more examples, but there's no point. Today, unless you go totally off-grid, you'll never have the privacy people took for granted at the end of the 20th century. It's that simple. ®