Firefox x HitRecord: Too Much Information

Where do you draw the line for TMI online? We partnered with HitRecord to find out!

Learn more about how to protect yourself online here: https://mzl.la/2u7Xo6t

You're going -

[Music]

So, the internet.

The internet has become this place where
anything you want to know, or see, or hear

you can find it online and get it for free

Thing is,

almost none of that stuff is actually free

Because, at the same time

as we're getting all this information,

we're also giving away
a lot of our own information

Usually without even realizing
that we're giving it away

or realizing that that information
we just gave away

is worth money

Lots of money

[Music]

Me personally up until
a few years ago,

I never used to even think about discounting at all

I did start thinking about it

because I acted in a movie where

I played Edward Snowden, but

I realized that I think most people just like me,

really don't ... think about this kind of thing

[Music]

So want to make a video

about what all sorts of different people

think about this kind of thing

But myself not even really being an expert about it

I also wanted to bring in

someone who knows an awful lot about the

Internet how it works and how privacy figures into it

She's the director of engineering at Firefox

and her name is Selena Declan
- Hi

So to start things off,
I asked one simple question:

"Do you even care about online privacy?"

- Well ..

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Absolutely care about online privacy

I don't want my information compromised

I don't want people taking my identity

Overall, I really don't care

I'll do what I can on my end to protect myself

but I'm not going to worry myself sick about it

I feel like I share a lot of

information online without meaning to,

whenever I buy things online or just

searching sites
I don't know how much of

my information is being shared

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Something that I have noticed when listening to

people's experiences with internet privacy

is that there are a lot of misconceptions

and they don't really understand how things are happening behind the scenes

So I think it's really important

that we have more conversations about this

and explain it for everyone

Selena Deckelmann
Firefox, Director of Engineering

Your digital footprint

I share ... a lot
probably the detriment of my family and friends

Social media kind of has quite us in a position
in which

everything can be shared,

in which everything can and does and extent

should be shared

I don't think it's necessarily bad that

there's so much more information out there now than there

ever used to be

It's a question of how that information gets used

and it's sort of up to us to know what's happening

There are a lot of companies out there

capitalizing on these new technologies

My facebook ads have become

scarily accurate for what I would buy

I just find it weird when you're not actually

doing anything on the internet in order

for an ad to show up

I don't like the fact that a supermarket can judge

when my monthly cycle is and that's when

they print off the vouchers with my tools,

said for money off sanitary ware

My supermarket knows when I'm going to have a period

The data trail timeline

Sometimes people might feel a little creeped out

by what happens just because they went shopping for something one day

The reality is, in this day and age,

almost everything we do leave some sort of digital footprint

and that data is being collected,

processed, and distributed to third parties

with or without your knowledge

that, example of what happens with a grocery store

If you kind of walk through that,

You know, you go to the grocery store

and you have a loyalty card for that store

that has some unique identifier

So, there's probably some sort of number

and then at that point,

the store has uniquely identified you

and they have a database somewhere with that information

and when you checkout, they have
a list of everything that you bought

and they will associate that with the loyalty card

So, at that point

they have this little piece of information

and that can be used in a lot of different ways

Some report might get created

That report might be what
should we stock next week.

Another report might be
what should we advertise to

someone who bought, let's say
we bought some tampons

and when should we advertise
that to her in the future

and so they've got some
algorithm that they're using to generate

that report and then they will send that

off to a third party to do that

advertising. So at that point your data's

kind of out there and you didn't really

ask them to do that. You may or may not

have intended for that to happen
but it happened anyway

It sort of feels like this giant
mountain we can't do anything about,

and I'm not sure what we
could do as a little person.

I pretty much don't share anything online that

I would be upset if it ended up on the

front page of a newspaper.

Everything that I put online is not true, it's not

accurate, and that's the
best way to control privacy.

Hi, I'd like to speak to an man names
Perry, lastname Noid. Perry Noid.

There's a wide variety of actions

that you can take to
protect yourself online.

The first step is just being

generally aware of where you're going

online and what you're clicking on.

It's important for reasons that aren't just

strictly a privacy and data collection,

but also there's this thing called

phishing where people try to get you to

enter in personal information into a

website that you didn't intend.

Other things you can do is using private

browsing mode or something like that in

your browser to restrict the information

that is being shared between multiple

different web sites there are more sort

of like technical things that you can

try, like some people look into VPNs,
a virtual private network.

A VPN is a service you can use that is

basically a middleman between you and

the rest of the internet, so that

websites you visit, they think that

you're coming from the VPN provider, not

from where you came from originally.

You can use a VPN when you're maybe in a

place that's unfamiliar and you want to make

sure that your browsing, or maybe you're

checking your email or something like

that, that it's private and secure.

At this point, we all kind of have to

take a step back and say is this what we

want? Is this how we want our information

to be used? Do we want more controls on

this? Do people want to know exactly how

their information is going to get shared?

So, I think my sense from hearing both

the emotion and the content of what

people said, is that people would like to

have a little more control. They would

like to have a little more insight and

hopefully, as time passes we'll find ways

to make that happen.

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