The Biggest Threats to Privacy in 2020

What Could Potentially Take Our Privacy For Good This Year?

Photo by Tom Roberts on Unsplash

People are quick to say that 2020 is the year we lose our last semblance of privacy. (But they said that in 2019, and 2018, and 2017…)

I think people generally can still maintain some expectation of privacy, but there are certainly some groups and organizations that want that privacy to be taken away. These are what I consider to be the most serious threats to privacy in 2020.

Regulation That Bans Encryption

Governments around the world have already passed laws banning encryption in their countries. This move leaves people’s information vulnerable to surveillance and hacks. The problem is that governments aren’t the only groups that can exploit this lack of security.

Encryption is important because without it using the internet at all can leave your personal information available for anyone to access. If encryption is banned on a national level, crimes like identity theft and fraud will likely increase drastically.

Read More: World Map of Encryption Laws and Policies

Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks are when someone contacts you via email, text message, or social media in an attempt to extract sensitive information from you. These messages may appear to come from someone you know or a business that you’re familiar with, but this is a tactic that these hackers use.

You should verify that these messages are actually coming from who the sender claims to be. These attackers can exploit social media and other digital communication methods to establish trust with their victims.

Cybercrime Syndicates

Organized crime, is no longer in the hands of mobsters and drug lords. Cybercrime syndicates, groups of hackers, are now big-time threats. Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election is one example of the influence that hackers can have on major world processes.

The Increasingly Compromised Web

There are new apps and websites popping up all the time. Unfortunately, many of these fail to implement “best practices” when it comes to security.

According to W3Techs, over 40 percent of all websites still lack HTTPS encryption. For static webpages that people don’t have to interact with or enter information into, the implications of this are fairly low stakes. However, some well-known, popular websites still have broken encryption that could allow Man-In-The-Middle attacks to steal people’s passwords or other information.

Poorly Secured Internet of Things (IoT) Devices

According to VXchange, there will be 20.4 billion IoT devices in the world this year. Each new IoT device presents an opportunity for companies to collect information about people and their behavior.

People assume that a refrigerator or an internet-connected toy couldn’t collect any sensitive data so they don’t think twice about connecting these devices to their network. The problem is that the company that makes the device may have included vulnerabilities in the systems running on these devices. Hackers can then exploit these vulnerabilities to access other devices connected to your network.

Facial Recognition

Facial recognition technology is making its way into our lives in more and more places all the time.

Kashmir Hill recently wrote a story for The New York Times about Clearview AI, which runs a facial recognition app. Clearview has collected a large database of more than three billion images from places like Facebook and YouTube and uses that information to identify people in other images. The company has begun selling its technology to law enforcement agencies around the United States.

How can people have any expectation of privacy if they are being monitored everywhere they go? And with AI systems in place, anyone can easily be identified just by showing their face.