Your personal information and habits are valuable information, and more and more we’re seeing manufacturers apparently keeping their prices down by instead making money from your data. While everyone is aware of this for free services like Facebook or LinkedIn, we now also need to be smart about what data we want to share with Samsung, LG, your router manufacturer, and of course your security camera company.
The good news is that you can normally opt out of the most intrusive data sharing while not losing functionality (unlike some websites we all know about…), but it’s not always clear and straightforward as to how to do it. There have been some great articles written to help you, such as this one in the Washington Post, but this is a continually evolving challenge.
We recommend you try to ‘untick’ as many data-sharing options as you can, and only agree to those that you are sure will benefit you. Remember, both ‘to serve you more relevant adverts’ and ‘to help improve our services’ mean about the same thing when it comes to sharing your data!