Yes, unfortunately other people, including people one is not particularly close to, can have a large impact on one’s privacy. Granting contact list access to a social media company has far-reaching effects, as does, as I mentioned earlier, tagging and posting photos of tour group members.
That’s why I think protecting privacy requires a layered approach. No one defense is enough these days. Plus the ways our information is abused now goes way beyond unwanted emails and phone calls. Here is one very revealing news story that has stayed with me since it was written a few years ago:
…a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like Airbnb and OkCupid. “Sift judges whether or not you can be trusted,” he wrote, “yet there’s no file with your name that it can produce upon request.”
As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I’d ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I’d opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time.