Written by Zouhair Belkoura, Founder and CEO of KeepSafe
Of course you are in control of your own data … right? Well, not exactly. With every save, send, upload or terms of usage you agree to, you may be giving away control of your own data without even realizing it.
Think about the last time you took a picture with your phone. Where is that picture stored? Of course you have it on your phone, but do you know about all the other places it may be?? It’s pretty common to use the automatic upload features your operating system offers you. However, it’s just as common to forget about all the useful apps and services that you granted access to your photos to make your life easier. Dropbox, iCloud, Google Photos and countless other apps can each grab their own copies of every picture you've taken because you once gave them permission. Your phone copies and uploads them to your cloud services, often without telling you. With every copy you don’t know about, you have lost control over your own files.
A picture is just one example, because the issue extends to all of your data, including documents, web browsing history, financial and banking details, location sensors, SMS and email messages, and even address book contacts.
Knowledge is power. Not knowing all the places your data is stored, sent or shared with means losing control. Not knowing makes it very difficult (or nearly impossible) to protect your own digital privacy. Because so often the software, apps and services we all use are not intuitive and transparent, it is hard to have true ownership of your digital belongings.
Keeping your digital belongings private should not be this complicated. Digital privacy should be as simple as the ways you keep your offline belongings private: closing the cabinet drawer you store financial documents in or shutting your closet door where keep your jewelry box.
When you leave your house, you lock the front door, but that would be pretty pointless if you left your windows wide open. In your digital life, you often do exactly that. You don’t know or don’t remember all the windows you left open, let alone know how to close them.
That’s how you end up deleting photos off your phone, thinking they’re gone when in reality they are still stored in multiple places that you auto-uploaded them to. With every copy, true ownership, control and privacy over your stuff becomes less and less intuitive.
The point is not for you to panic. The point is for you to think about where you put your data and what apps can access it. If you want full control, it may be time to turn off all the automatic helper functions. If you don’t want to go that far, find apps that explicitly don’t integrate with everything else, so when you decide you need to be in control, you really know where your data is.
We built KeepSafe to give you back control by creating a safe place for your digital valuables. Our goal is to make digital privacy easy and intuitive. However, removing confusion and ambiguity should be the job of everyone in the tech industry. All your services need to make sure you know what’s happening to your data, always. In the end, only when you know where your data goes, can you truly hold the keys to your privacy.
About the author:
Zouhair Belkoura started KeepSafe because he realized that we have little control over our digital content. In his own life, he realized the lines between personal and professional were becoming increasingly blurry. He would open up his smartphone to share photos of whiteboards in the office, but as he scrolled through galleries, he would end up accidentally exposing private pictures in the process. At KeepSafe,the goal is to provide everyone with easy access to control over their digital belongings. KeepSafe currently addresses a very specific use case; the Android and iPhone apps provide a vault to hide pictures and videos.