What is privacy:

• as a human right that our parents fought for and that we need to preserve or we will loose it
• right that givea you contol over what personal (you consider intimate and belonging to you) information you publish (make available) to whom (that you trust) and on what conditions (what they can do with it).

How privacy is violated

• breaking if trust by missuse of private information, e.g. publishing to untrusted (by you) parties (e.g. 14 eye secret government orgs, hundreds of marketing orgs, data traders etc.)

Common misconceptions:

• privacy is about hiding everything you do - no, it is about who decides what is published and how
• privacy requires giving up important things - no, there are better (privacy wise) alternatives, understanding and accepting tradeoffs (what exactly are you giving away with what potential consequences vs what you gain from given service)

Risks with giving away control over your personal data

• even if you trust the party they can leak/get hacked your dara
• this data can be used against you or your family: fraud, fishing, black mail etc.

Things to considered whe to trust 3rd party with your dara

• your threat model (what misuse you want to prevent and what you can accept)
• business model - follow the money
• privacy policy - can it change without notice, with whom data is shared, for what use and when
• is software open source (client, server) and if binay builds are reproducible from that source - closed sourc software may go against privacy policy without anybody noticing
• can you stay anonymous to the service provider: if they want your phone number then no
• what information is collected automatically: your phone book (valuable target that is more personal than you think), usage data, behavioral data, crash reports etc.

Attacks on human right to privacy and freedom of speach:

• EARN IT - govt black mail of corporations to gain totalitarian autority for privacy invasion law making by group of friends
• global surveillance (Snowden)
• surveillance capitalism buiseness model
• ads, behaviour tracing, data brokers and big data
• venture capitalist, exponential growrth, data is new oil
• depreciation of cash

Initiatives to preserve rights:

• GDPR
• client to client encryption, zero-trust models
• open source distributed services
• not for profit orgs and privacy centric alternativea with clear business models and money trails

Good online resources for privacy. Some articles about parties that break trust on regular basis (FB, GOOG, credit cards, etc). Stallman was right.