Mozilla ‘Creep-O-Meter’ Gauges the State of Online Privacy: Here’s Where We Stand

pcmag.com:

You now have a new way to quantify your personal privacy dystopia: A “Creep-O-Meter” score from the Mozilla Foundation that puts a number on the state of digital privacy each year.

The first such score, published Wednesday, is 75.6 out of 100, which the nonprofit behind the Firefox browser describes subjectively as “Very Creepy” and illustrates with an anxious-face emoji. Mozilla’s post announcing this data point doesn’t break out the underlying math beyond saying that it’s “calculated using both quantitative and qualitative measures.” It instead points to a few broad industry tends: 

“Products are getting more secure, but also a lot less private” (as in, companies do a better job of protecting the transfer of your data to and from them but then want more of your data);

“An increasing number of products can’t be used offline” (so you’ll probably have to cough up at least an email address, maybe more, to use your next gadget);

“Privacy policies are getting ridiculous” (ain’t that the truth!).

The post also includes a quiz (with a note saying “Your score will not be recorded in our system and no personal data will be collected”), inviting you to select which of 16 gadgets and apps, some already discontinued, that you use to estimate your “Digital Privacy Footprint.” 

The only ones that applied to me were the Signal encrypted-messaging app and a Roku streaming stick, which led an advance copy of the quiz to pronounce me “off the grid.” But of course I’m not, because while we don’t have an Amazon Echo Studio at home, we do have a plain old Amazon Echo in the kitchen. And while I’m not among the tiny minority of people to buy a Facebook Portal smart display, I still check Facebook to see friends’ pictures of pets, kids, food,