Blog 8: Privacy

 

    After watching a few TED talks on privacy it reinforced many ideas about keeping your identity safe on the internet. These privacy issues that affect me, my family  and all internet user stem from contracts of adhesion. Furthermore, these are defined as legally binding contracts that prevent the customer from having little to no power in the agreement. This is done through the terms and conditions of every major social media app. Since they are created for the sake of data mining information from their users it's no surprise that this agreement gives them the power to do so. Data mining can be done through multiple methods whether that be user generated info, tracking malware, or deep packet inspection. All of these will effect us through the advertisements, google searches, and video recommendations we see. However due to how my me and my family reserved outlook on social media its safe to say that is the most that would effect us. Many people live their lives as if social media is intertwined with physical lives which leads to them posting more pictures of themselves and adding everyone they meet on social media. This can cause even more problems when they mix social media and their private life as mentioned in the Dareith Chisholm TED Talk  on revenge porn. People who revolve their relationships around sending personal pictures are the main targets of this because those images are turned into weapons later down the line thus damaging reputation and security. 

    Since the government heavily relies on this it's hard to say what kind of changes could realistically be put in place. Not to mention newer generations are getting access to phones at younger ages thus making them more accustomed to the internet as a way of life thus eliminating the idea of privacy. This is becoming more apparent when we think about what a digital dossier looks like today. Furthermore, these include all of your post, google searches, private and public identity which allows the government to find out who you are easily. At face value this may seem like a huge issue that needs to be stopped but in reality its not that big of a deal. Rather it is necessary to some extent since the FBI uses many of these online techniques to track potentially and highly dangerous criminals. However gaining access to this information can be abused. One example of this can be seen by Catherine Crump TED Talk  where she addresses how police use a plate reading system to record the plates of anyone they want regardless of if your a criminal or not. This system in particular is even more of a problem because of how its used to target ethnic groups such as Muslims.   

    When it comes to how we should protect privacy I feel as if the best way to accomplish this is by using a fake account. By doing this you're able to better protect yourself from being targeted by different groups including the government. Furthermore this can be seen all throughout social media, the presence of fake accounts allows the users to act completely anonymous on the internet. Another method of staying anonymous is to use VPNs, virtual private networks, these can be used to bypass tracking and secure your searches and site information.