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Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column where we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. The last column covered how to talk to your family about not posting your baby photos online.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to carry out the largest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history, and many human rights groups fear he will also introduce or reinstate rules targeting broader immigrant communities as well, even if they have gone through processes. legal. access routes or have been naturalized. If his previous administration is any indicationwhich may include people from certain Muslim-majority countriesasylum seekers and refugees.
Civil liberties groups are preparing for what this will mean for the privacy and data security of immigrants across the country. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is already looking to expand its surveillance network and has called for new contracts to add to the agency’s ankle monitor system. according to wiring.
There are few protections against the state surveillance apparatus that has been used by every administration in recent times to monitor people in the United States and that will likely continue to be used under Trump. The United States does not have federal privacy regulations that effectively limit how companies collect your data and what they can do with it. For years, and more recently with new fervor, technology companies have been actively competing for government and national security contracts as they seek to expand their bottom lines.
There are active efforts to organize against this surveillance system and “demand that tech companies and the government stop surveilling and criminalizing us,” says Hannah Lucal, a data and technology researcher at the immigration law firm Just Futures Law. There are also harm reduction strategies that people can employ in their daily lives.
“Digital security can be really overwhelming because there are so many tasks to do,” Lucal said. “You should assume that tech companies, law enforcement agencies, and immigration authorities can access anything you send, post, search, watch, or view online if they want. But there are ways to make it much more difficult.”
The following tips are not exhaustive, but are some of the high-priority recommendations Just Futures Law and other organizations have suggested if you are an asylum seeker or immigrant concerned about protecting your privacy. At a high level, you should try to minimize the amount of data you store or share, be especially aware of which apps you share your location with, and delete your data when possible.
Your messages disappear
Let’s start with messaging. For many of the privacy concerns we’ve addressed, whether it’s ensuring your messages aren’t used to train AI or protecting your kids’ photos, one of the most important strategies for protecting your privacy is use encrypted messages. It’s one of the first steps in the data minimization that Lucal suggests for immigrants. In the simplest terms, that means that only the sender and recipient can access the messages. Not even the company that runs the messaging service can access your text messages, making it extremely difficult for them to hand them over to nosy government agencies or third parties, including immigration authorities.
Sign: Most experts recommend Signal because it is not only end-to-end encrypted, but it is also run by a nonprofit organization with fewer financial incentives to collect and share your data with third parties and the government. The other reason why Signal works very well is that you can set your messages to be automatically deleted after a certain period of time, which Lucal highly recommends. You can do this for each individual chat or you can set disappearing messages for all chats. To set your messages to disappear in a specific chat, click on that conversation, tap the name of the person you’re talking to, and then click “disappearing messages.” You will be asked to choose how long you want messages to remain in the chat. To do this for all conversations, click on your profile photo in the top left corner of your app, click on settings, select “privacy,” and then click on “disappearing messages” to choose how long you want them to appear. messages are visible.
That said, it’s understandably difficult to get started with a messaging service if everyone you’re talking to isn’t using it as well. You have other options.
Apple iMessage: This is also end-to-end encrypted when you talk to other people with iPhones and if you have advanced data protection turned on. You can do this by going into your iPhone’s settings, tapping your Apple ID profile at the top, tapping iCloud, and then scrolling down to the “Advanced Data Protection” option and turning it on. This will ensure that all data backed up to iCloud, including your messages, is end-to-end encrypted. But it also means that if you somehow lose access to your iCloud account, you won’t be able to recover that information from the company because Apple doesn’t have it on its servers.
WhatsApp: This platform is also end-to-end encrypted and has always been the most used messaging app in the world. However, very few surveillance and privacy experts I’ve spoken to recommend sharing personal information on Meta-owned platforms like WhatsApp. It is known that the company share personal data as well as posts from people and information about conversations they have through their various messaging apps with government and law enforcement agencies.
It’s hard to move all your conversations from a platform that everyone seems to be using to one that people might need to download. Lucal suggests talking to people in your community about how to keep each other safe and perhaps slowly transition to a safer platform.
But if that’s not currently an option, the same rules apply: use disappearing messages. This feature can be found in the settings of each WhatsApp chat which you can access by tapping on the chat name and then scrolling down to “disappearing messages.” Or if you want to apply it to all new conversations you start, head to the settings tab in the bottom right corner of the app. Click “privacy” and then click “default message timer” and select the length of time you want your message to remain visible.
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Automatically delete your data
In addition to automatically deleting your messages, you should minimize the amount of data that other apps and services collect about you and ensure that the data you allow them to collect is automatically deleted. The biggest one is Google, so let us make that an example.
Google: The company collects your web activity, Google searches, Gmail information, YouTube searches and videos you’ve watched, map activity, and more. The company also regularly shares data with authorities, including Ice. As we previously reported, technology companies, including Google, have provided Ice with some level of personal data even when the companies are not legally required to comply with the request because it is not certified by a court. In one case that I reported, the company only gave the person whose data Ice sought a week to figure out how to prevent the company from handing over that data. Google has also delivered lists of all the devices that are in a given location at a given time in response to broad location-based search commands, called geofence commands.
You can minimize the amount of data your business stores from your activity page on myactivity.google.com. Once you get there, you’ll be able to take a look at the depth and breadth of data Google collects about you. Your “chronology,” for example, is a detailed timeline of all the locations where the company tracked you. Fortunately, you can now turn off at least some of that tracking. First click on each setting: “web and app activity,” “timeline,” and “YouTube history.” That will open a page called “activity controls” and you can turn off that tracking entirely at the top. If for some reason you don’t want to disable it, you can set it to be automatically removed from that same page.
Turn off your location settings
Law enforcement agencies actively request or purchase location information from technology companies. We’ve reported on some of the ways police and immigration authorities are using geolocation information to conduct reverse warrant searches to try to find suspects by asking companies to give them a list of all the phones they have. found in a certain place. at a certain time. This, naturally, has dragged many people into investigating crimes with which they have nothing to do.
There is no sure way to stop all technology companies from tracking your location information. But there are ways to minimize the number of companies that have your location information and how often they track it.
make a 15One minute review of your location settings. On iPhones, you can go to your settings and look for “location services” at the top. Then click on “location”; which will take you to the location services menu. There you will see a list of all your apps and what your location preferences are for each one. You’ll want to review each of them and make sure your settings are set to “never” for apps that don’t need location data to work.
On Android, go to your settings, then “security and privacy”, then “privacy controls”, then “permissions manager” and select location. From there, you can review each app’s location settings to allow those apps to access your location only while you’re using the app, not at all, or to always ask.
And for apps that definitely need your location to perform their basic functionalities, Lucal suggests setting your preference to “ask next time or when sharing.” The least secure option is to only allow the app to access your location while you are using it. “Keep in mind that many times people have apps open even if they are not actively using them,” Lucal said.