The Battle for Privacy. Setting Data Collection Limitations
I believe there is no point in explaining how much various services (email, social networks, aggregators, payment systems) collect information about you, what rights you grant them to sell and transfer the collected data. If you are even slightly interested in the issues of privacy, and if you are subscribed to our news channel ITsec News, you are well aware of everything.
When in 2018 it became known about Facebook collecting call history as well as data on sent and received SMS, its representatives stated that users themselves agreed to share this information, which had been collected for years.
If you cannot refuse some services but are concerned about the uncontrolled collection of data about you, the solution proposed in this chapter will allow you to configure the disabling of data collection as much as the services you use allow.
Meet: Simple Opt Out – a privacy settings aggregator that includes links to the privacy settings of several popular services. Your task is to select from the list the websites you use, follow the links, and disable data collection. For some services, multiple links are provided, and it is important to follow each of them.
The service does not provide tips on configuration; it is up to your discretion. The main thing is to prohibit the use of your data for advertising purposes and their transfer to third parties whenever possible. I promise you an unforgettable experience after realizing how much information services collected about you and how easy it was to disable it. At the same time, for some services, such as PayPal, the main data collection is embedded in the user agreement and cannot be configured.
Simple Opt Out is a foreign project, and many Russian-speaking services are not included, particularly "VKontakte". Here are the links to the privacy settings for "VK."