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Many people see privacy as something that doesn’t really matter unless you have something to hide. People who guard their privacy are sometimes viewed with suspicion because of this, which is wrong and unfair.
Privacy is not about hiding information or being secretive, instead, it is an essential part of protecting human dignity. It enables us to establish boundaries around ourselves and to decide how, and with whom, we want to share certain parts of our lives, and how that information is used. Privacy protects us from unjustified use of government power, and over-reaching people or corporations. It allows us to decide what is known about us, and how it may be used.
Privacy is not a new concept. The US Constitution penned in 1789 makes many references to the right to privacy. An article called “The Right to Privacy” (or The Right to be Left Alone) was published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 reiterating many of these constitutional principles but *providing a bit more clarity on what is not ok, since it appears some were crossing the line, even back then.
The online world is often viewed through a different lens than normal life. Imagine you invite a colleague from work to your home for a meal. A few minutes into it, they excuse themselves from the table and you then find them in your bedroom rifling through your drawers and cupboards. There is an unwritten expectation that this behaviour is outside the boundaries of social acceptability, and if breached, would seriously jeopardise the relationship and violate trust.
Online privacy is no different. When you use an app or an online service for a certain purpose, your expectation is that it will not start sniffing through your photos, messages, or anything else that is not part of the service this app provides. These unwritten acceptable limits that are well understood in normal life have been purposefully blurred and shifted by companies that offer these online or app-based services because data about you is so valuable.
Why do companies want my data?
In the late 90s and early 2000s, companies like Google (who only really did Search at the time) saw that online advertising could be a very lucrative business. By offering a service that was free to use (like their search engine), they could start to build a picture of someone from their search history which would allow them to target adverts to their users which would be based on the topics they were searching for. This would result in much higher success rates for purchases and could thus be sold for a much higher advertising fee.
This is essentially what made Google the massive $2 Trillion company it is today. Others like Meta (FaceBook, Instagram, WhatsApp), ByteDance (TikTok), X (formally Twitter) etc. have all become enormous corporations mostly without charging their users a single cent.
Don’t all companies (including Pepkor) do this?
It’s important to stress that advertising is an important part of doing business, and organisations spend a huge amount of money on marketing and advertising, including Pepkor and its subsidiaries. We also want the maximum bang-for-buck when it comes to our marketing budget, and the more targeted and likely to end in a sale our advertising can be, the better. It’s also better for customers. Adverts that are not at all relevant to you are just annoying and a waste of time. I would rather see adverts related to things I need or am interested in than for things I don’t care about. Advertising, building pictures of customers etc. is normal and is something companies need to do to stay competitive. The issue comes in when customer trust is broken, and information is used without their permission, knowledge, or consent. Pepkor and its subsidiaries comply with all legal requirements related to this, and often goes above and beyond to protect our customer’s trust with how we use their data.
Unfortunately, when money is involved, people don’t often do the right thing. When the iPhone and Android Phones came out post 2007, and these apps could now move around with you rather than just seeing what you did on your PC at home, the amount of information these companies could collect exploded. They now knew where you are, where you’ve been, who your friends are, who you are in close proximity with, see any photos you took, messages you sent and potentially even listen to your conversations. Most of these companies mentioned above (and many others) started to collect this and other data (e.g. other apps you used including info about when and where you used them) and were able to build an extremely detailed and rich picture of a large part of the population.
These apps had no need to collect this information in order for them to provide the service they promised, and many didn’t even let the user know that they were collecting this data. These apps were essentially scratching around your bedroom without you knowing.
Many of these companies would sell the information they had collected on you to other companies for large sums of money. The information security practises of some of these companies were less than spectacular and many data breaches occurred resulting in your personal data, which was collected without your knowledge or consent, being in the hands of criminals who could use it for any number of nefarious purposes such as identity theft, impersonation, social engineering attacks etc.
If it’s free, you are the product.
Most people understand that if you don’t pay for a service or product, it’s usually because you are the product. Services like TikTok cost Millions of dollars a month to run, and with no paying users, most people understand that we’re giving them something they can use to fund the service (our information). There is nothing wrong with this, PROVIDED they are very clear about exactly what data they are gathering and what they’re doing with it. Most Social Media and other services have been somewhat covert about exactly what data they collected and what they did with it in the past, either actively hiding the fact they were collecting the data or burying it on page 75 of a 2pt font legal policy they forced users to accept before allowing them to use the service.
The European Union have forced a lot of changes around what companies are allowed to collect, and what they are allowed to do with it since the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was enacted in 2018. This was the first law with real teeth that could fine companies up to 4% of their global turnover if they didn’t comply with GDPR and stored or processed the personal data of EU citizens. This is good and has driven better behaviour.
The downside is that some parts have been taken to excess and have resulted in a much worse experience for users. The best example of this is the plainly ridiculous cookie acceptance policy that every website now presents us with. This is privacy taken a little far, but with the good comes some bad. Overall, we as consumers are much better off with these harsh privacy laws in place.
Our Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) is based on GDPR and fines and penalties are being issued where companies may be violating the law (collecting without permission etc.) or where negligence is found after a data breach. The Information Regulator usually issues an “Enforcement Notice” before a fine, giving the organisation that suffered the breach a good reason to invest in their information security in order to avoid fines which is an excellent outcome. It’s very difficult for a company to suffer a breach, have to pay a large fine and then still pay to improve security. An Enforcement Notice ensures that the investment required to remediate security issues can be done rather than just fining them.
Do what’s right, not what you can get away with!
Until more people start caring about privacy and voting against companies that are not doing the right thing by refusing to use their services, bad behaviour in this regard is not going away. We need to take our privacy seriously and start saying a big “No way!” to apps, services, governments, banks, insurance companies, retailers, and anyone who does not need to go through your underwear drawer in order to provide the service you expect from them. We don’t stand for it in real life, stop letting them do it in the virtual world!
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