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, and travel.
The Creep-O-Meter is part of Mozilla’s ongoing Privacy Not Included project, which has earlier offered advice about which privacy-compromising gadgets you should not give as gifts and outlined the egregious failings of connected-car privacy policies.
A press release from the San Francisco-based Mozilla Foundation credits the “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for giving that nonprofit the idea for this gauge. That metric, created in 1947 by the Bulletin as an estimate of how close humanity stands to a nuclear holocaust, was set at a full 17 minutes from midnight in the halcyon, post-Cold-War days of 1991 but now stands at just 90 seconds to midnight following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Creep-O-Meter’s score of 75.6 would equate to about 15 minutes before midnight, which doesn’t seem that bad in comparison. But when it comes to digital privacy, things can always get worse and often do.
