Goodbye 2024! Welcome 2025!
I can’t say I’m going to miss 2024, but I am looking forward to what 2025 might bring. I’m hoping for more cookies. ~I just received a big box of Christmas cookies from my daughter! Yum!! But did you know some cookies can be tasteless? I’m talking about advertising cookies! You’ve seen them, those annoying popups asking you to accept cookies in order to use the web site.
A little bit of a back story: Several months ago, I thought I would experiment with one of those services that offers to erase your data from the dark web. Now I’m a natural born skeptic but I figured the most I could lose would be the 1-year subscription fee. The best would be to get rid of the annoying phone calls on our land line. Yes, I still have a land line. I live in rural America with lots of trees that like to throw branches through the greenhouse roof and block cell signals. The 5 a.m. robo calls are the worst. They were trying to sell Medicare supplements. I thought I would trick them and answered affirmative to their questions (even though I’m not eligible for Medicare). I thought if could speak with a person and explain that I’m not eligible, they would stop calling. I was SO WRONG! I accidentally inflamed them and we went from receiving a couple of phone calls in the early morning hours to receiving several calls per hour, all day long. We unplugged the phone. I checked with my phone provider and they recommended that I sign up at nomorobo.com. I would like to say that solved the problem. It lessened the problem, but the real solution was to wait for the Medicare signup period to expire. Our spam calls are down to just a couple per week now.
Meanwhile, I was receiving reports about all the stuff my “REMOVE ME” service from incogni.com was doing. Getting me off the robo phone call list isn’t something they excel at. But one of their reports included a link to the hidden costs of using apparel shopping apps.
(https://blog.incogni.com/apparel-shopping-apps-research/) The report made me throw-up a little (or maybe that was because of an overindulgence of Christmas cookies?)
Regardless, here is the Janet synopsis: Incogni researched 180 apps belonging to the top apparel brands. 45 of the apps collect your photos, 12 collect videos, 9 search your history, 6 collect your sexual orientation, 24 share photos with third parties, 2 share sexual orientation, 1 shares health information! What?! Nike & H&M collect the greatest numbers of data points, including photos, videos and messages! As expected, and necessary for making online purchases, the email address is the most collected data point.
Do you have to participate? NO! When the popup appears asking you to accept their cookies, say NO! I’ve never had a site break because I refused to accept the marketing or performance cookies.
I really like the Incogni conclusion: A mousetrap only works because the mouse doesn’t understand why the cheese is free. Variations of this phrase regularly do the rounds in the cybersecurity and privacy-advocacy communities. The incentives associated with using proprietary apps to buy apparel—or even just the convenience of doing so—come with hidden costs.
It’s arguably easier to tap on an app icon than it is to dig up a bookmark or type in a URL. As our research shows, though, these and other benefits come at a price. Consumers are, of course, free to decide whether the deal on offer is right for them, but this has to be an informed decision. It is our hope that research like this will go some way towards helping consumers get the most bang for their personal data.
At the very least, they should know that the cheese in front of them is demonstrably not free.
That’s cheese for thought this January. Have a great new year!
Stay Safe and keep your data private.
Janet
Because It Made Me Laugh!
