Our Data is Not Secure - Ever play Angry Birds or Candy Crush Saga?

Our Data is Not Secure

Ever Play Angry Birds?  Your information has been stolen.

Open up any newspaper or news website and you can find stories about the NSA data mining, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Microsoft receiving requests to send information to the our government, and local government agencies snooping into your phones and computers.

Currently, at the olympics in Russia, there is an enormous effort underway to steal data from the people visiting the county which is authorized by the Russian government.

At the olympics, "Russian law allows its intelligence agents to do electronic snooping on anyone inside the country, meaning the phones and personal computers of thousands of foreign visitors, including Americans, are fair game. But even outside of the law, Russian organized crime groups also are well known for hacking smartphones and email for information they use for illicit profit." (ABC News, 2014)

Here at home, "The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot." (Washington Post, 2014)

"If you're spending hours on your phone playing games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga, or posting online to Google+ and Pinterest, you're probably being spied on. The latest releases from NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden reveal that the National Security Agency, and its UK counterpart, GCHQ, are mining the ad networks utilized in these apps to collect a trove of information on you." (WonderHowTo, 2014)

Even the local government agencies are jumping on board, "Armed with new technologies, including mobile devices that tap into cellphone data in real time, dozens of local and state police agencies are capturing information about thousands of cellphone users at a time, whether they are targets of an investigation or not, according to public records obtained by USA TODAY and Gannett newspapers and TV stations.

The records, from more than 125 police agencies in 33 states, reveal:

About one in four law-enforcement agencies have used a tactic known as a "tower dump," which gives police data about the identity, activity and location of any phone that connects to the targeted cellphone towers over a set span of time, usually an hour or two. A typical dump covers multiple towers, and wireless providers, and can net information from thousands of phones." (USA Today, 2013)

I have been telling my friends about this possibility for years.  Remember this next time you ignore the fine print and agree blindly to the Terms of Use for that cool free app.