Privacy, Please! (Blog Post #2)
Why doesn't Cookie Monster have good internet privacy? Because he always accepts the cookies! Today's post is all about internet privacy and what we can do to protect ourselves. According to https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-privacy-stats, 9 out of 10 Americans consider their online privacy to be an important issue, and two-thirds of global consumers feel that tech companies have too much control over their data.
While the internet has so many benefits, it also has a dark underbelly that we need to be concerned about. Many people in today's society play on the internet, blindsided by the potential harm they are causing to themselves. People will hear internet horror stories and think "This could never happen to me". Everyone needs to be aware of internet safety because everyone has a digital footprint that could come back and haunt them. Juan Enriquez compared these digital footprints to tattoos in a recent TED Talk and highlighted the idea that everything is permanent, whether you like it or not.
The government benefits from this new age of technology because they are able to use new mass surveillance techniques to gather sensitive data. This allows them to get a deeper understanding of how private citizens interact behind closed doors. Some examples as to how they do this are with license plate automatic readers and cell towers. These two devices grant the government location information about all citizens. Some telephone companies even allow the government to wiretap. This can be seen as a good thing because it helps the government protect us, but also it can be seen as a privacy violation.
The biggest takeaway I got from researching internet privacy was that we need to be careful with what we are posting on social media because we can't really go back. We can take action to prevent future invasions of privacy by being cautious about the terms we are agreeing to online. Darieth Chisolm said it best in her TED Talk by saying, "We need to demand accountability and responsiveness from online companies, we need to promote social responsibilities for posting, sharing, and texting, and we need to restore dignity to victims".
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