Your Calendar Might Know Your Credit Card Number

I was thinking about signing up with Calendly, so people could book appointments with me. Bad idea. I am a privacy advocate, and I can’t sign up with a firm that actively engages in propagating malware to spy on their customers. But, don’t believe me, here is the class action filed against Calendly back in 2023 for enabling wiretapping of its customers – not sure how that is progressing. I hope it is not true, but either way, I am not going to use the service and will have my account deleted.

This is not a huge shock, but more just a reminder that the technology to do keylogging is not all that complex to implement. The technology taps into and records all your typing, mouse-clicks and touchscreen interactions on the web page(s) you are using. Ergo, if someone is on Calendly, they might fill a form with their name, email and phone number. Then let’s say the need to use a credit card to pay $20 for the meeting. All that is recorded and shipped to a third party who compiles it for their customer (Calendly, in this case, if the action is indeed found to be true).

But that means, in plain terms, that a credit card number and almost all the info needed to use it, has been captured by a 3rd party. Maybe they don’t use it. . . but it was indeed captured!

This is just calendar scheduling software, but think about it: If something as benign as a calendar service can hire Heap to wiretap a customer, it is a bit unsettling to think where else these little JavaScript snippets might be living, right? We buy bigger badder computers, tablets and phones. They don’t get any faster. Mayhaps because a bulk of CPU cycles are dedicated to all the software running without the user’s knowledge? . . . Awesome.

This type of corporate behavior motivates me to host my own websites, boycott Udemy, and explains why I’d rather not do business with Google or the other firms like them. There are a lot of businesses out there preying on their customer’s data. The internet is old news, and as it has progressed, some people believe privacy is dead. With the dawning of bolder AI and quantum computing, it’s hard to argue otherwise, but regardless of how massive the scope of these shady business practices, I contend there are things we can do to make it harder for firms to prey on their customers.

For those who still value privacy, there are still likely many competing views on what “privacy” even looks like. But, I will share some ideas, and if they sound useful, then yay:

• Use products and services that value your privacy: I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, I use their browser on my mobile phone, I use Firefox as my browser, I use a Linux operating system (Ubuntu is a friendly one, and there are many more), and I use Proton for my email (and they have other apps like a VPN and Password Vault).
  
• Pay for your software: As folks have said,”If it is free for you, then you are not the customer.” So, make yourself the customer. Pay for your software, or donate to the developer ecosystems that make your software. I am not judging – I am guilty and recovering here as well!
  
• Join an organization or two: Find a non-profit or other organization that resonates, and sign up for their newsletters. For example, I was using Certbot for my servers, and noticed it was produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF… what the EFF, I signed up for their newsletter).
  
• Stay inquisitive: We want to believe, we want to trust, and most importantly, we DON’T want to be bothered, because life is super fast-paced and demanding, we just want to enjoy it, right. But when it comes to your softwares. . . it takes 30 seconds to ask AI if there are any privacy concerns with an app, or if there are any privacy-forward alternatives (that is, until AI becomes influencer poisoned like the rest of the internet, but as of this writing, still viable to consult with AI).
  
• Seek your truth: Sometimes we try to shortcut research using quick social media and influencer recommendations. It’s fine to start there, but don’t get on a trolly without doing your own research. Find your version of the truth, anchor it on sources deeper than a tweet, and then make your choice about which software to install.

That’s it, the end of the rant is here. It’s interesting, though, how the concepts listed above are about reclaiming privacy, but they are also about reclaiming independence and freedom. There’s a correlation I wasn’t expecting to see emerge, and maybe I will explore that linkage more in the future. There are two reason’s to conduct your own fact finding: broadly it is to honor your own journey in life and come to your own unique mix of personal truths, but more specifically, it’s about using your personal truths to preserve the things you value in your life. I value privacy, and I am constantly researching and refining my personal truths to uphold privacy for myself and for those around me who share in some semblance of that belief.

Do you have privacy-first software you use? An organization that champions privacy that you want to give a shout-out to? Comment below!