dataleak Archives -

Apr

2018

Recently we heard about the Facebook data leak, what sort of data was it and how that data was leaked? How does it effect to us. Why someone will steal our data and do we really need to bother about it? Is that so serious? Will someone steal our bank account after this data leak, or will someone hack our phone and computer? Can a plumber please fix this? What is this leak?

Situation is so confusing for most of us who addicted to Facebook and using it just for the sack of connecting with their near and dear ones. They do share their happy moments, trip information, success stories, their kids examination results, family get to gather information, vacations photos, that’s pretty much it. What else?

For the sack of argument if some is poking in our Facebook data, why do we bother about? I meant is it that serous that we should delete our Facebook account? Then how will we spend our time, then how will we actually poke in others life?

So the biggest problem for many us directly or indirectly, how will be able to see what others are doing and how will we be able to share our stories to everyone, if they will remove their Facebook account and their be nothing for us to Like, Share, make fun off and nothing will left for comment. Situation is back to square one, what do we do now?

The co-founder of Whatsapp Brian Acton is so troubled with this that he had twitted “It is time. #deletefacebook. Now while using his twitter account, he forgot that on Nov 3^rd, 2017 – US President, Donald Trump’s @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was deactivated for almost 11 minutes. On Mar 21^st, 2016, the Indian Prime Minister’s official Twitter handle was owned by a teenager for almost 15 minutes. Just imaging it can happen to the world’s most power man’s account, then how can we expect ourselves to be spared from it?

On the different tangent, Tim Cook, the Apple CEO said that such sort of possession of data with companies like Facebook shouldn’t even exist in the first place. Unfortunately he forgot the news about the IOS code leak on Feb 8^th, 2018 and when Hackers had embarrassed Apple with data leak back in 2012. Similarly in 2014 Apple admits celebrity accounts were hacked. The list in long. I’ll not go in detail. Here you can check on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

So let’s get back to our basic question what should we do now, delete the Facebook account of keep it? If you ask to me, I would suggest post this and move on;

I, Qazi Tariq, do hereby give my PERMISSION to the Police, the CBI, the NSA, the ISI, FIA. FBI, CIA, MI6, RajniKant, James Bond, Miss Moneypenny, M, Q, the Swiss Guard, the Priory of Scion, the inhabitants of Middle Earth, The White walkers, First Men, Nobel houses of Seven Kingdom , Mereen, Dothrakis, SEAL TEAM 6, Agents Mulder and Scully, the Goonies, ALL the Storm Troopers and Darth Vader, the Mad Hatter, Chuck Norris, S.H.I.E.L.D, The Avengers, The Illuminati, The Men in Black, X-Men, Ghost Busters, The Justice League, Gandalf and Dumbledore, Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, The Great Pumpkin, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, School House Rock, Mr. Rogers, Captain Kangaroo, The Tooth Fairy, The Krampus, and all the members of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Black Sabbath, Voltron, The Groovy Ghoulies, the Thunder Cats, Dr. Who, Hart to Hart, Mystery inc. (Scooby Doo), James Garner, Angela Landsbury, the WWF, the EPA, and even Magnum P.I., He-Man, Jay and Silent Bob, Cheech & Chong, Neo, Blade, the NHL, MLB, the Boondock Saints, Shaktiman and to all my beloved FRIENDS to view all the amazing and interesting things I publish on Facebook.

I’m aware that my privacy ended the very day that I created an account on Facebook, I know that whatever I post can (and usually does) get shared, tagged, copied, and posted elsewhere because I’m THAT awesome. If I don’t want anyone else to have it, then I don’t post it!

Our Information – personal / professional

Apr

2018

We used to enter all the required information asked by any of the website, without understanding the consequences of it. Since these are marked with RED asterisk “*”, we have no choice but to provide it. Have we ever thought, why does these information asked?

We are habitual of receiving lots of mails on daily basis. Our mail provider, Outlook, Gmail, Ymail etc has given us the Spam / Junk mail facility, where we can move such unwanted mails. Our mailing system is already very intelligent, which moves many of such mails in the spam / junk folder by its own. It does have the feature, which permanently delete such mails over a period of time.

Since we are so used to about these mails, notification, alerts, calls, sms, whatsapp message that we sometimes decide to live with it. Some of us gives up and let it be like that. Some of us decide to fight back against these unwanted messages. As a result we have DND “Do Not Disturb” facility, still some of these unwanted messages are reaching to us.

What these messages are? Well these can be advertisement, promotions, news, information; the matter of fact, these could be anything. But if we haven’t subscribed for these, why these are coming to us? Unfortunately knowingly or unknowingly we used to subscribe for these messages, while accepting the terms and condition during the registration of some of the sites / portals etc. Now if we have done so, then there should not be so much of hue and cry.

The problem starts, when so many of such messages starts appearing from many providers.

How does others getting our data? Is the site / portal whom we have provided our information responsible for it? Is the owner of the company responsible of it? Is the government responsible of it? If the owner of company resigns, will that resolve the problem? If the CEO gets terminated will that solves the problem? The answer is NO. The process has to be matured to secure these information.

There are possibly two very simple and common method of such data leak, one – code’s security testing wasn’t done properly and two – someone internal or external has the database access. I am not blaming here the developers or hackers, instead I believe someone’s responsibilities are compromised.

Remember the future’s oil is data and that is the reason you will notice everyone is asking for data. The more data the company have, the better prediction will be done by them. To understand it more, we take the simplest example which we see during our Search. As we start typing to the search box, it starts giving us suggestions. Similarly our personal and professional information provide lots of information to others. Lets take another example; we used to receive lots of calls for loan, how? They know out credit score and they have the defaulter’s data with them. Lets take another example; we used to receive lots of mail and calls about many job portals including those whom we haven’t even registered, how? They are pulling the information from our professional database.

So far there is not any solid idea, which I am aware of to stop data leak and misuse of our data but one, which may reduce these, is to make ourselves responsible of our data because whatever is once out over internet, assume it is public. Hence we should deactivate our account from all those places, which are not needed anymore. Stop registering ourselves here and there. Think twice before installing any free software. Think again for registering ourselves for receiving any free alerts or promotions.

Again the Data is today’s Gold, the more it is with the companies the better they will be. So the companies will keep on asking for it. It is for us, how we deal with it.

Delete Facebook Account

Our Information – personal / professional