The country’s top agency for cybersecurity warned Malaysians that the use of navigation app Waze poses significant national security risks as its new terms of service are subject to Israeli law.
Modern digital platforms and apps present both national security risks and direct threats to citizen privacy and personal data.
Full stop.
Do not pretend, thinking and believing they are not.
Does this means all Malaysians uninstall all the apps that they are now in their mobiles?
Platforms argue that managing data for billions of users requires complex data architecture. They emphasize that they invest heavily in engineering teams to comply with evolving global frameworks like GDPR and CCPA and some level of data tracking and processing is technically necessary to provide personalized services, prevent fraud, and maintain security infrastructure.
But regulatory enforcement actions, privacy advocates, and cybersecurity audits have repeatedly demonstrated a significant gap between what digital platforms promise in their privacy policies and how user data is managed in reality.
Most policies are intentionally long, vague, and filled with legal jargon.
These documents serve more as legal shields for the companies rather than clear protections for the users.
Studies show it would take the average person hundreds of hours a year to read the privacy policies of every service they use, effectively forcing users to agree without understanding.
A platform might promise not to "sell" your data directly, but they may still "share" it with third-party partners, advertising networks, and data brokers.
This creates a complex ecosystem where user data is continuously commercialized behind the scenes.
The primary business model for many major platforms is targeted advertising.
This creates a fundamental conflict of interest: the company's financial success relies on collecting, analyzing, and monetizing as much personal behavioral data as possible.
That the above are the reality of Digital Privacy Policies.
That is why we read about regulators like the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and European Data Protection Authorities (under GDPR) regularly issue billion-dollar fines to major tech firms for violating their own stated privacy policies or deceptively tracking users.
Companies will publicly declare that they never created a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and they have also never allowed any government direct access to their servers.
But in reality, it is not.
A report in June 2013 published by the Guardian newspaper in the UK alleged that the National Security Agency in the US has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats.
Of course, Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants denied the report with everyone claiming they had "never heard" of Prism.
The government can’t advise all Malaysians to stop usage as it is unrealistic in our interconnected society.
Those advising the government should instead advise and guide the public how to mitigate the risks, determine their own personal risk level, their profession, and their daily needs instead of a blanket order as to stop using or delete the apps from their mobiles.
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