Data Privacy problems in communication

What does Personally Identifiable Information mean?

Personally identifiable information (PII, mainly a US term) is information that, when used alone or with other relevant data, can identify an individual. PII may contain direct identifiers (e.g., passport information) that can identify a person uniquely, or quasi-identifiers (e.g., race) that can be combined with other quasi-identifiers (e.g., date of birth) to successfully recognize an individual.[1]

What does Personal Data mean?

Personal data (mainly an EU term) encompasses a broader range of contexts than Personally identifiable information. For instance, your IP address, device ID numbers, browser cookies, online aliases, or genetic data. Certain attributes such as religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or medical history may be classified as personal data but not personally identifiable information.[1]

What is Data Security?

Data Security and data privacy are often used interchangeably, but there are distinct differences. Data Security protects data from unauthorised access, modification, or deletion by malicious insiders or external attackers.

Widespread Data Security types are data access management, data encrypted, data backup and intrusion detection.

What is Data Privacy?

Data privacy is an area of data protection that focuses on collecting and using sensitive data, including personal and other confidential data, such as financial and intellectual property data. Most known data privacy regulations are the EU GDPR and the US CCPA.

The most common Data Privacy Regulation violations are collecting Personal Data without proper consent and loosing consumer data via data breach.

Classic telecommunication operators

Classic telephone operators are famous for their data-rich operation. An account openings and the publish of a new phone number are subject to the provision of large amounts of personal information, partly for local regulations and partly for marketing and other purposes. The details associated with the form of payment will be recorded and linked to your account. Communications are saved and accessed by the government in accordance with local legal regulations.

All-in-one VoIP service providers

Unlike classic telecom operators, new-wave VoIP solutions are perhaps even more interesting from a Privacy standpoint. Providers typically run targeted, performance-based marketing campaigns instead of running high-budget branding campaigns. The fuel for these campaigns is _data_: the goal is to create the most accurate user targets possible along the system usage and socio-demographic data of existing customers.

In short, these companies collect all existing data about their customers in order to gain new customers based on it.

Tech-giants-owned communication platform

They are concerned about both data security and attitudes towards data. The explicit purpose of these companies (e.g. WhatsApp) is to harvest user data, as their service has a data-based business model.

While these solutions are convenient and can be extremely dangerous to our personal information, they are not considered an alternative to traditional telecommunications operators or companies providing new-wave VoIP services.

For example, the said whatsApp monitors and broadcasts more than 169 data points from us to Facebook to refine our profile, including our payment and consumption habits, the topic of our conversations.

The Signal

Signal’s clean approach to protecting personal information is commendable and sympathetic. Still, there are three cardinal issues with it that do not make it a secure and private alternative communication solution:

1. The system asks for a phone number to register. The problem is that the public telephone number has all the personal information of its service provider

2. The system uses a Peer-To-Peer connection. Regardless of the encryption, the greater the distance the data packets travel, the greater the chance that a malitious third party will intercept the data.

3. Signal is not an alternative to a telephone system.