Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. The last column covered how to talk to your family about not posting your baby’s photos on the internet.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to execute the largest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in American history, and many rights groups are concerned he’ll also introduce or reinstate rules that target broader immigrant communities as well – even if they’ve come through legal pathways or have been naturalized. If his prior administration is any indication, that can include people from certain Muslim-majority countries, asylum seekers and refugees.
Civil liberties groups are bracing for what this will mean for the privacy and data security of immigrants around the country. Already, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is looking to expand its surveillance network and has put out a call for new contracts to add to the agency’s system of ankle monitors, according to Wired.
There are few protections against the state surveillance apparatus that has been used by every administration in recent memory to monitor people in the US and will probably continue to be used under Trump. The US has no federal privacy regulations on the books that effectively limit how companies collect your data and what they can do with it. Tech companies have for years, and more recently with new fervor, been actively vying for national security and government contracts as they look to expand their bottom lines.
There are active efforts to organize against this surveillance system and “demand that tech companies and the government stop surveilling and criminalizing us”, says Hannah Lucal, a data and tech fellow at immigration legal firm Just Futures Law. There are also harm-reduction strategies people can employ in their daily lives.
“Digital security can feel really overwhelming because it feels like a lot of tasks to do,” Lucal said. “You should assume tech companies, law enforcement agencies, immigration enforcement can access anything that you message, post, search, look at, watch online if they want to. But there are ways to make it a lot harder for them.”
The following tips are not exhaustive but are some of the high-priority recommendations Just Futures Law and other organizations have suggested if you’re an asylum seeker or immigrant concerned about protecting your privacy. At a high level, you should be looking at minimizing how much data you’re storing or sharing, be especially vigilant about which apps you’re sharing your location with and deleting your data when possible.
Disappear your messages
Let’s start with messaging. For a lot of the privacy concerns we’ve addressed, be it ensuring your messages aren’t being used to train AI or protecting your children’s photos, one of the most important strategies for protecting your privacy is to use encrypted messaging. It’s one of the first steps in data minimization that Lucal suggests for immigrants. In the simplest terms, that means that messages can only be accessed by the sender and recipient. Not even the company that runs the messaging service can access your texts, which makes these messages extremely difficult for them to hand over to prying government agencies or third parties, including immigration enforcement authorities.
Signal: Most experts recommend Signal because it’s not only end-to-end encrypted but also run by a non-profit with fewer financial incentives to collect and share your data with third parties and the government. The other reason Signal works great is you can set your messages to automatically be deleted after a certain period of time, which Lucal highly recommends. You can do that for each individual chat or you can set up disappearing messages for all chats. To set up your messages to disappear in a specific chat, click into that conversation, tap the name of the person you’re talking to and then click on “disappearing messages”. You’ll be asked to choose how long you want the messages to remain in the chat. To do this for all conversations, click on your profile picture in the top left corner of your app, click on settings, select “privacy” and then click on “disappearing messages” to choose how long you want messages to be visible.
That said, it is understandably difficult to just start using a messaging service if all the people you’re talking to don’t also use that service. You do have other options.
Apple iMessage: This is also end-to-end encrypted when you’re talking to other people with iPhones and if you have advanced data protection turned on. You can do that by going into your iPhone settings, tapping on your Apple ID profile at the top, tapping on iCloud and then scrolling down to the “Advanced Data Protection” option and turning it on. This will ensure that all of the data that is backed up to your iCloud, including your messages, is end-to-end encrypted. But it also means that if you somehow lose access to your iCloud account, you will not be able to get that information back from the company because Apple does not have it on its servers.
WhatsApp: This platform is also end-to-end encrypted and has consistently been the most used messaging app in the world. Very few surveillance and privacy experts I’ve spoken with recommend sharing any personal information on Meta-owned platforms like WhatsApp, however. The company has been known to share personal details as well as people’s posts and information about conversations they have over its various messenger apps with law enforcement and government agencies.
It is difficult to move all your conversations from a platform that everyone in the world seems to be using to one that people might need to download. Lucal suggests having discussions with people within your community about how to keep one another safe and perhaps slowly transitioning to a more secure platform.
But if that is not currently an option, the same rules apply: use disappearing messages. This feature can be found in the settings of each WhatsApp chat which you can access by tapping on the name of the chat and then scrolling down to “disappearing messages”. Or if you want to apply it across all new conversations you start, head over to the settings tab at the bottom right corner of the app. Click on “privacy” and then click on “default message timer” and select the time period you want your message to stay visible.
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Auto-delete your data
In addition to auto-deleting your messages, you should minimize how much data other apps and services are collecting about you and ensure that the data you do allow them to collect is being auto-deleted. The big one is Google, so allow us to make an example out of them.
Google: the company collects your web activity, Google searches, Gmail information, YouTube searches and videos you’ve watched, map activity and more. The company also regularly shares data with law enforcement, including Ice. As we previously reported, tech firms including Google have given Ice some level of personal data even when the companies are not legally required to comply with the request because it is not court certified. In one case I reported on, the company only gave the person whose data Ice sought a week to figure out how to stop the company from handing over that data. Google also has handed over lists of all the devices that happen to be at a certain place at a certain time in response to broad location-based search warrants, called geofence warrants.
You can minimize how much data the company stores from your activity page at myactivity.google.com. Once you get there you’ll get a peek into the depth and breadth of the data Google collects on you. Your “timeline”, for instance, is a detailed chronology of all the locations the company tracked you. Fortunately, you can now turn at least some of that tracking off. First click on each setting: “web and app activity”, “timeline” and “YouTube history”. That will open up a page called “activity controls” and you can turn off that tracking completely right at the top. If for some reason you don’t want to turn it off, you can set it to auto-delete from that same page.
Turn off your location settings
Law enforcement is actively asking tech companies for location information or buying it. We’ve reported on some of the ways police and immigration authorities are using geolocation information to do reverse warrant searches with which they try to come up with suspects by asking companies to give them a list of every phone that happened to be at a certain place at a certain time. This, naturally, has swept many people up into investigations into crimes they have nothing to do with.
There’s no surefire way to stop every tech company from tracking your location information. But there are ways to minimize how many companies have your location information and how often they track it.
Do a 15-minute review of your location settings. On iPhones, you can go into your settings and search for “location services” at the top. Then click on “location”; that will bring you to the location services menu. There you’ll see a list of all of your apps and what your location preferences are for each. You’ll want to go through each of them and make sure your settings are set to “never” for apps that don’t need location data to function.
On Android, go to your settings, then “security and privacy”, then “privacy controls”, then “permission manager” and select location. From there you can revise the location settings of each app to either allow those apps to access your location only while using the app, not at all or to ask every time.
And for apps that definitely need your location to do its basic functionalities, Lucal suggests setting your preference to “ask next time or when I share”. The less secure option is to only allow the app to access your location while you’re using the app. “Keep in mind, oftentimes people have apps open even if they’re not actively using them,” Lucal said.