I’m Paula Santolaya, reporting live from SANTOLIVE in my virtual reality. Do you have opinions or suggestions? Post them in the comments section down below or email me at info@santolive.com.

In the digital universe of data, maintaining anonymity and privacy is no easy task. Many people constantly expose their lives on the Internet by posting personal photos of what they do in their day to day and the places they have traveled. But they are unaware that these images offer valuable information that can be used for commercial or malicious purposes by companies and cybercriminals. Precisely at the beginning of this year, it became known that the American company Clearview had created a database with more than three billion! of images of users around the world, offering facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies and companies. And where did Clearview get those images from? Naturally from the Internet.

We must take into account that this technology allows us to reveal, without explicit consent on our part, highly sensitive information about a person such as their real name, telephone number, occupation and even their home address and that this data can be sold to companies.

A recent report published by the Federal Commissioner for Privacy in Canada, Daniel Therrien, has warned about the the privacy rights violations on the Internet by companies. Countries like the United Kingdom and Australia have already opened a joint investigation into the bad practices of some companies such as the aforementioned Clearview.

Digital privacy in Spain is regulated by the Organic Law on Data Protection and Guarantee of Digital Rights, adapted to the European regulations of the General Data Protection Regulation, however many of these practices escape the law so it does not hurt to configure the privacy of our social networks to determine who can access the publications and do it periodically, because ‘Internet witches’ sometimes leave our data on the air.

On the other hand, special care must be taken with the dissemination that parents make of photos and videos of their children on social media, since they can cause irreparable damage such as cyberbullying, identity theft or data theft. It is not the first time that an innocent photo of a baby in his bathtub has ended up being part of a database of pederasty. It is the adult’s responsibility to protect the privacy of the children to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

So, the next time we are asked to register for an app or post a photo of ourselves or our family and friends on social media, let’s count to one hundred.