Almost everone uses the internet every single day, but people don't know that websites are tracking your information every second. Websites retrive your information by using cookies to see what you search up online. This is why it is important to read a website's privacy policy to see what types of information they are collecting from you. Reading a privacy policy can help you stay safe on the internet more by helping you understand how all the information is retrieved and where it is stored. Website owners want your information so that they could use it to have compnies buy add spaces for their products. Anonymity is a very important feature of the internet because in a world where there is not a lot of privacy, we need to hold on to what we have and make sure they don't get all of our personal information. I recently have completed a project on the privacy policy of Snapchat. This project shows how much information one app can collect from you.
- Snapchat divides the information that you collect into three different categories: information you choose to give us, information we get when you use our services, and information we get from third parties. Information that you chose to give us is, well, information that we chose to give them.This includes your username, password, email address, phone number, and your date of birth. The information we get when you use our services is by far the area they collect the most information from you. This area includes your usage information, content information, device information, device phonebook, camera and photos, location information, information collected by cookies and other technologies, and log information. Information we collect from third parties is when they collect information when it was popular to use third party apps to upload a photo from your camera roll to snapchat. Due to the constant updates to snapchat, this is less of a problem and not that much of a problem now.
- In the Information we get when you use our services portion of the first question, it said that snapchat indeed uses cookies. These cookies can be beneficial to the app creator by they could see what people are looking up and possibly approach a company and see if they would be interested in buying an ad space or snapchat could partner with the company and do a special discount event.
- Snapchat does share information with third parties. The third parties they share with are either service providers, sellers, and partners. They could also share the information with third parties due to legal reasons and as a part of a merger or acquisition. This could be dangerous for the fact that companies that you have no idea about could get your information and send you emails or even call your phone. This could be beneficial for the fact that it could expose companies that aren't very big to the public.
- Yes Snapchat does give you the option to put in your email address and phone number. It is very important to use the privacy options when they are available to you because it could give you more safety from outside threats. If a site does not offer privacy options, you could make the judgement that the site may not be that safe and you should consider not making an account on it. If you do continue to make an account on the site, then make sure you change your password often and check your email often.
- I think that websites or apps want to collect specific information about you so that they can see what things people are looking up and contact a company that makes that item and offer them an ad space so that they could gain more revenue.