Web Hygiene 101: The Data Trail You’re Leaving Behind and How to Clean It Up

Do you know how much data you’re leaving behind with just a simple Google search? And do you know who’s scraping up that data and making loads of money selling it to advertisers? In this interactive workshop, attendees will have a chance to see what kind of data they’re leaving behind and learn some ways to take back control. Hint: crypto can help. Featuring Dele Atanda of metaMe, and Alex McDougall of Bicameral Ventures. Hosted by Bailey Reutzel.“It’s really more of the mundane that is the big challenge in the big data world today,” McDougal said. While there are risks of hacks and corporate malfeasance, McDougal argues that the biggest privacy issues today revolve around the mundane aspects of daily life. Corporate actors and governments want to know how you spend your time, what you watch and were you go – and all of this information is readily available and encoded into the terms of services of most apps.None of this is transparent, but knowing where to look and what to opt out of could help people regain some control over their data. McDougal takes a beat to walk users down the Lockdown app, one such tool for eliminating the watchful glare of Big Tech.He all proposes: Instead of having our data flowing everywhere, stored and siloed by centralized actors, “why don’t we take our usage data from all these different platforms” – from Google to banking – “and port it over to a blockchain-powered, self-sovereign profile.”This solution would enable people to maintain ownership of their data, and even sell it to corporations on their own terms.