A New and Improved Way to Stay Safer Online

A presentation on Data Privacy may not have as much pizazz as, say, “Sex in your 70s” or “Enjoying your 80s,” but the many Villagers who did not let the title dissuade them were well rewarded.

Melissa Rosser from the California Privacy Protection Agency gave practical information on ways we can prevent scammers from getting ahold of our personal information. By personal information she means everything from social security number and health information to shopping history, online search history, even loyalty card purchases at Vons and Ralphs. Scammers want it all. 

The good news is all that information is protected under California law. We have rights. 

More good news is that the California Privacy Protection Agency (CalPrivacy) was recently established to help protect us from those scammers. To that end, it launched a new online tool called DROP. DROP, which stands for Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, is an easy way for all California residents to keep their personal information out of the hands of registered data brokers. 

Data brokers? This is where the intrigue lies. A data broker is a business that collects and sells personal information about consumers they have no direct relationship with. They collect your shopping history, social networking sites, census and other public records - car registration, voting registration, email, zip code, yada, yada, yada - and sell it to marketing firms, market researchers, nonprofits and anyone else willing to pay for it. To put the scope of this into perspective, there are 585 licensed data brokers in California. Data brokerage is a multi-billion-dollar industry. 

Villager Judy Packard went on the CalPrivacy website and signed up for DROP and downloaded the web browser “Duck Duck Go.” She says,“So far it seems that it blocks ads and cookies on the web.” Holly Thiercof, who also attended the presentation, says she intends to sign up for DROP.

Melissa also gave step-by-step instructions on how to submit privacy requests to online businesses and a lot of solid, practical advice, most of which she acknowledged we’ve probably heard a zillion times. 

But heard is not the same as heed. It’s time we heed these smart practices, such as:

# Use strong passwords and change them regularly

# Turn on multi-factor authentication.

# Delete browsing history and cookies

# Go through your apps and turn off tracking 

# Delete apps you don’t use (you may have forgotten about them, but they haven’t forgotten you.)

If all that sounds like more than what you want to tackle on your own, you can get help from our volunteers at the next Pasadena Village IT Café on September 12, 10:00 a.m.

For more information or to request the deletion of your personal information from registered data brokers, go to Privacy.ca.gov/DROP.