How can we exercise our privacy rights?

Now, this is where technology has to come in. So what if a law gives you the right to delete your data if you have to track down 10,000 companies and make a request to each of them. There is no universal “delete” or “do not sell” list like the US tried to do with Do Not Call, which has been a miserable failure by the way. 

So there need to be tools out there that automate the process of transparency of what is being done with our data and automates opting out of where we don’t want our personal data being used.

There are now some apps and services, like PrivacyHawk, that we’re building, that help people take back transparency and control over how their data is used. Privacy services will soon become as common as antivirus and homeowners insurance. Everyone has it.

What we can tell you is that corporations aren’t going to help you. And the government will make some laws that are hard to take advantage of. But it’s really dangerous to just do nothing about our privacy.

As artificial intelligence gets exponentially better as we are seeing, it will become more powerful and it will be much easier to use AI to manipulate and scam us using all the data out there available to scammers and bad people. It is already relatively easy to piece together thousands of data points about billions of people. It’s not too far away where scams and identity theft will be more common using AI, which will make it much harder to stop. 

So we’ve got to take back control over our privacy before it takes control of us and harms us, our friends, or families. 

PrivacyHawk has a free inbox scan feature that can help you easily identify which companies and apps are likely to be using your private information. You can use PrivacyHawk to make delete requests to any apps that no longer need your data.

PrivacyHawk also automates data broker removal for you so you don’t have to spend weeks trying to do it yourself. And it continually monitors for new risks and automatically squashes them as soon as they are found.