Security Bite: Americans are contradicting themselves around privacy

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Americans have a privacy problem, which shouldn’t come as any surprise. Between Ring’s now scrapped interconnected doorbell feature “Search Party,” the unprecedented backlash around Flock cameras, and data brokers quietly selling away our identities, individual privacy is center stage for Americans right now. I would go as far as to make it the inaugural Security Bite ‘Theme of the Year.’

Yet despite all of that, a new survey from data removal service Incogni found that 45% of the 1,517 U.S. adults polled say they aren’t concerned about their online privacy. That wasn’t even the best part of this survey though…

Among people who said they have nothing to hide, 58% would refuse to hand a stranger their unlocked phone for any amount of money, 39% cover the camera on their phone or laptop, and nearly half wouldn’t hand over their text messages to the government or “Big Tech,” even for three months of their income.

I asked Ron Zayas, founder and CEO of Ironwall by Incogni, what’s actually going on here, and he basically replied that privacy only feels abstract until it isn’t.

“We take privacy for granted, until it means that someone will read our messages, charge us more, put us in danger or disclose intimate details about us,” he told me. “But the reality is, all of that is privacy.” He also thinks companies lean on that gap on purpose, pointing out that if a privacy policy actually said “download this app and we will go through your contacts, suck in your photos, analyze your habits and share those details with anyone willing to pay us,” most of us would pause. Instead, they open with “we value your privacy” and bury the rest in legalese.

The survey also found that 65% of respondents have no idea how many websites they’re registered on, and honestly, I’m not sure I could tell you mine either. We’ve all spent the last decade or so creating accounts for things we used once and forgot about, and every one of them is still holding onto something. You can’t protect data you don’t remember giving away, right?

So I asked Zayas where someone on an iPhone or Mac should start if they want to cut that down without going full underground, and his answer was more Apple-friendly than I was expecting. “Apple has some pretty good safety protocols, much better than Google in my opinion, and makes them far easier to access,” he said. “Turn off as much of ad personalization, location sharing and contact sharing as you can. It only takes a moment.” He also recommends treating your phone number like you would a credit card number. Allowing an app to have access to your contacts will also give it your own.

Zayas put it well when he said that believing you have to “go full bunker in Montana” to have any privacy is a fallacy companies push to make people feel helpless, and I agree with him. If you live in California, the CCPA and Delete Act let you force a good chunk of your data off the market for free. For everyone else, a few minutes to clean things up in Privacy & Security can go a long way. The survey honestly put it better by saying, most of us already act like our privacy matters, so we might as well stop saying it doesn’t.

Ron Zayas will join the Security Bite podcast next week. Subscribe you don’t miss my interview with him.

Security Bite is 9to5Mac’s weekly deep dive into the world of Apple security. Each week, Arin Waichulis unpacks new threats, privacy concerns, vulnerabilities, and more, shaping an ecosystem of over 2 billion devices. Every other week on the Security Bite Podcast, he sits down with experts in the field to break down the most pressing topics.