 Hello everyone. My name is Nikolai Komarov. As I said, I'm an expert in online marketing. I also have an IT background so I thought I know enough to tell you today about such thing as personal privacy and about big companies who collect personal data about you. We will discuss what kind of companies there are, what kind of data they collect, why they do it and should you be scared about it. Please, raise your hand if you use Google. And if you sometimes use Windows from Microsoft. Okay. Is there anyone who doesn't use Microsoft or Google products, who doesn't have a cell phone based on Android? Anyone? Oh, good. So, at least 99.99% of the audience is interested in the topic, so why are we here? The big companies can be divided into two important groups. These are Search Engines and the Social Networks. The main Search Engine by Alphabet Company is the Google.com. There is also Bing with a smaller money share. And not only global players are here but also some locals who work in China or Russia. I will mention it later. I will tell you why I mention it now. And the other group is the Social Network companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and other. First, let's talk about the Search Engines. What do you know about the data they collect about you? Just speak about it. Yes? You will get everything if you are a search user account. And they also are very interesting in which keys you type and which times and really seconds and success things you have in your mind before you travel. Yes, so the search terms, the sites you visit, what else? I just want to find out what else you know. The voice. We have an Android device. The voice commands and searches are also stored in the company. Anything else? The location. Right. They do it using the Wi-Fi network you have connected to or the GPS data. The operating system on the phone always sends the device and the link between the Wi-Fi network you are at and the GPS position, the mobile network base station, everything is collected and sent. And there is also some other stuff that is saved. It all started in 90s and all this data also was completed with different other stuff because companies are very interested in having a very complete and specific, a very detailed profile of yours. That's why for example Google has added a social network, they created Google Plus in order to see your activity. They created several services and products for you that all are also tracking all your activities, your interests, your everyday life. And so the whole list is pretty scary. Everything you do, everything you watch, the music, the video, the places, even the emails that you have on the gmail.com in your inbox. They are also used for some reason. I would also mention that there is about one billion gmail users around the globe right now. Please, your question. It's true that for some full mail, that's giving our mails written to our mail, they send the content, analyze it and save it. Yes, everything, right, all your contacts in the inbox, all the emails including names, phone numbers, different keywords, everything is indexed and stored, and that's a little later why. And as I said, for example Google has developed a lot of services like Translate, Play Home, All Photos, Contrasts and Calendar, Keep Darts, Sheets and Drive and many others just in order to make your profile really detailed. Scary. Yeah, now the social networks. They have a little different approach. You log in every day, you talk about your activity, you post your life, you share, you are a member of different groups. You are also a creator or moderator, maintainer of some group or fan page. You also like videos, tell where you're traveling to, what you've done yesterday, where you're going to go. So they know everything about you, but despite of the search engines, they also have a lot of information about people around you because they know who your friends are and you're mostly even if you don't really tell anything about you. They still know to which circle you live on and they can probably tell that you are doing similar things as your friends do. So they also know everything like this, but a little bit more. And how it works. First in the 90s everything started really from good intentions. Nobody likes to log in every time they use some site. You had to type it and then you close the page, open it again, you have to type it again. That's really stupid. So there was a little technology created that was called cookie files. First time you log in, you get a little file that is stored by a browser on your computer and there is a secret key that your browser sends again so that you don't have to log in again later. And then smart guys from big companies found out that it makes sense and it's profitable to pack up these files with different IDs of yours to track you. When you move somewhere, a special code on every page, it asks the browser what kind of file you have, what IDs you have there and it can easily say that it is you who visited this site. So now such pieces of code that track you. They are included in every web page, in every free app you use, in the operating system components, also in every kind of software. Is the telegram encrypted? So how come it's tracking the activity as well or how does that work if it's not encrypted? Well, telegram, it's an interesting feature that they encrypt your messages and it's probably true because it's very important for their image to sustain that. But they have all the opportunity to get all the IDs of the hardware you use, I mean the phone, they also know the mobile phone, the SIM card you have and all the stuff. They have the opportunity, they don't use it right now to get profit because they are only growing to get their money share, but they are going to use it later because nobody can do everything for free and not make profit from it forever. And then all these data is uploaded to the data centers where it's processed and sold. So that's the question, if it's more some kind of high-tech crime that our government cannot prevent, or is it a good thing? That's the question. I will tell you my marketing company and we make ads for our customers so I know how it looks from the advertisers side. I will tell you how it looks. Advertisers don't really see the exact information of every user. The whole data is divided by little groups, by little sectors and as an advertiser I have access to different groups and sectors so that I could show my ads only to people who are mostly interested in that. I don't have access, I cannot request Marie Petrova or someone and check everything about her. That's impossible, so breathe out. But still, there are some tricks that could help me use it in a non-standard way. As an advertiser I know I can use following criteria to select who I want to show my ads to. That's everything you see, including age groups, sex, parental and marital status, lists of websites you use so I can catch you there. And coming back to this general stuff, Google provides us as advertisers an opportunity to show ads to people who have specific keywords, phone numbers, website names, emails and everything that is contained there. If I specify it, my ads will be shown to these people right in their email boxes. That's pretty advanced technology, it helps to really reach people with very specific interests. But also I can upload my own phone numbers or emails that I collect somewhere, Google doesn't check if it was done legally and show these ads to this list of people. So basically I can parse data from some web catalogs or maybe I can download a database hacked from some resource, you know, the linkage from the user base and then just show ads to the people who I'm interested in. The same thing with Facebook and other networks, they don't take any money from their users but they sell their interests. So I as an advertiser pay for that, pay for this specific access and it is in the interest of the social network to provide me with every possibility to see the specific group of people I want that I'm interested in. That's pretty the same stuff and now also search engines try to get to this area of social networks, social networks integrate search, communicators build something like internal social networks and vice-versa, everything's mixed so that they could get everything from you for free. But still you have an opportunity to check what kind of data is safe on Google, you can see what's locations, searches and everything you had. The same thing on Facebook, you can manage that, you can delete parts of data that you don't want to belong to Google anymore. And the reason why these companies keep this data manageable by you, why they allow you to delete your account, why they tell that they will delete everything if you request. They won't delete it really but that's because of the technical limitations but in general they keep your data and try to protect it so that no bad guys including government can use it because your trust, their reputation that's what their business is built on. And you know the recent scandals with NSA and other secret services who actually monitor users, they are also for them it's just a contact they can get all the details from social networks so till the last years they also were listening to the traffic between data centers of big companies to get the inside data. And companies try to protect themselves from them, they encrypt the channels, they improve security so that no one could do it without a court order. And so to some extent you can actually be sure that your data will be solved in such an anonymous way and that it will not be just given to government or some bad guys in such a detailed personalized way. Okay now I'll just touch some ways of protecting yourself if you're still not happy with this situation, I'm not sure if you are. I just wanted to mention that there are two kinds of ends of this range. You can be either a person who doesn't care about this personal data, who posts everything about him and then for example says I will travel to Hawaii next week and then your flat gets robbed, who is guilty, you are. The other end of this range is to be a total paranoid, only use paper and not use any electronic devices or reset your mobile phone every day at your time or something. It also makes like inconvenience you will do everything slowly and I'll try to offer you some instruments, some means, some strategies to keep the balance between your personal data protection and the comfort and the efficiency that modern tools give you. So the first part is trying to use independent services or services by foreign companies who don't really have a possibility to sell your data to someone. For example if you live in Germany you can use Russian companies, apps and search, there is a Russian company called Yandex, it's like Russian Google where there are also contacts, maps, search, social network, mail and different other things that this company won't really... Well there are only several companies in Russia who might be interested in your data as a foreigner. And other thing is using some independent products from Mozilla Foundation, Firefox, they earn by sending people to Google, Google pays them for searches but there is no such extensive tracking module in Firefox as it is in Google Chrome. So you will send less data to Google. Also an alternative to Gmail, it's also free but you'll see how much it's stuffed with ads but at least they are not so tightly connected to other big guys. Another pretty interesting option is not to use American devices, to use the Chinese things, Korean, because they try to reach, to get some market share from Google and they give you an opportunity to install only the least part of the Android operating system without Google services at all. They have their own service for contacts, for a calendar, mail and all the stuff and you can have, well if you're not an international criminal then the US government is not interested in such users. It's not worth to break in such a phone and it's just to complicate. The same with Samsung. Another big topic is encryption. You know there are less and less open Wi-Fi connections, Wi-Fi networks around the globe but still point attention, at least don't send sensitive data, passwords and stuff over open. Networks always use the protective ones. You can also have an Opera browser, an independent user who has a built-in VPN client. It is a component that connects you to some distant point and every other external resources see you as if you were there at that distant point, not where you are. So it also adds up a little to your anonymity and makes your image a bit fuzzy. The same thing about protection is about secure protocols with websites. The good news is that Google also struggles to let all the site owners make it encrypted because it also solves some problems for Google. And the same with clients, email clients, messengers and all the other stuff. If possible use Telegram not WhatsApp that is belong to Facebook and not Instagram that belong to Facebook. Use independent tools more so that they know about you less. And I think a couple of last things is really have to learn how to do that. In every browser there is an anonymous mode where you open a new folder and a new tab and in this tab browser there is nothing about it or at least close to that. And you can also use a Tor browser which is designed, it's only function to make you as more anonymous as possible. So that if you are looking for something dirty that's your choice but not only. Also just register several different domain names, make several emails and use a separate email, separate sites for different areas of your life. If you share, if you communicate to different groups of people send this email to this email. I for example have an own domain name, you'll see them at the end of the presentation and they give everyone his own personal email address. So if the database of the company is broken I start receiving spam. I know instantly who lost it or who sold it and they can block it and start receiving emails for this address. And also you can split everything you can. So domains, emails, phone numbers, devices you use. Just don't let them collect this unified image and know much about you. Now you have an opportunity to ask me some questions. Please, yes. What for them? Apple? Is it bad? Yes they are. Not in such a big way also Microsoft is not that bad right now because they failed to share this search mark with Google. They failed to make their own phones and they have a different business model. They earn more on, speaking about Microsoft, they earn more on the corporate clients and Apple just sells really special things to really rich people.