Do you ever feel like you’re being watched?
You start typing something into Google and it finishes your sentence, you ask Alexa to play music and she starts playing your favorite songs, the ads you see on your phone and your computer are the things you’ve been saving up to buy. Suddenly, you realize the internet is your best friend and it knows everything about you from your favorite color, music, and movies, to your favorite pastimes. Oh and it also knows all of your deepest and darkest secrets, the things your best friend would never share with anyone.
Unfortunately, the internet isn’t here to be your best friend, it’s here to make you feel like everything is perfectly fine all the while it is recording your everyday behaviors and logging your actions. During our last class, our guest speaker Montse Medina spoke about how her company developed an AI algorithm that would generate terabytes of data by collecting as much information about a user as possible such as age, ethnicity, sex, location, interests, and much more. This information would then be used to tailor follow up emails to customers to draw them back to a certain website to purchase more items. Additionally, once you were on the website you would only be shown things that would interest you.
At the surface, collecting your data to save you time by immediately showing you the things you care about doesn’t seem inherently bad – and I’m not saying it is. It seems especially appealing when you realize all the data your internet service provider (ISP) and specific applications such as Facebook are collecting on individuals can help the government crackdown on terrorism and crime. So what’s all the fuss about? If you’re not doing anything wrong and you have nothing to hide, then there is nothing to worry about.
However, it’s not quite that simple and not everyone has that luxury. For some people around the world living in an oppressive government, one seemingly harmless action on the internet could land you time in jail. For others, you may be building a backlog of data that could be used against you at some point in time such as a movie you may have illegally downloaded if you use BitTorrent, or the sketchy sites you may have been visiting that you wouldn’t want your mother to know about. If you dive even deeper, you realize a weekend spent searching about a particular cancer could leak to your health insurance provider, or your new job searches could make their way to your boss [1].
Not to mention, this data being collected is being stored on a cloud somewhere, hopefully secure. Even if its stored with a company you decided to put all your trust in, it could be sold to third parties, accessed by the government, or even breached by hackers to reveal to the world.
You might be wondering if you’re feeling paranoid or just want to feel like you’re in control again is there anything you can do to secure your privacy? With the growing interest in data collection for marketing and advertising as well as defense related applications, the short answer is no. No matter how many precautions you take, unless you stop using the internet completely the FBI will always be able to dig up what illegal activities you may be pursuing if you raise enough red flags. As for commercial companies spying on you to market better to you, there are a few solutions.
If you would just like some of your privacy back, there are a number of things you could do from enabling built in data blockers in certain web browsers you use, to downloading third party apps that will delete cookies and disable data tracking scripts on websites for you, and even virtual private networks (VPNs) that could mask your physical location. If you want an additional layer of protection, you could use the Tor network which was originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratories to protect sensitive government communications [2]. This network essentially obfuscates your internet activity throughout random servers around the world.
Just remember the next time you go looking for free software, it’s only free because you’re the product, not the customer.
References:
[1] https://privacypolicies.com/blog/isp-tracking-you/
[2] https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en
5 comments on “Do you ever feel like you’re being watched?”
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Alekos,
Kudos for touching this subject and clearly showing that while we are making great technological progress in data collection to improve our lives, on the other hand we are losing our own privacy with the same tools. Google someone name before even trying to make friendship is becoming the norm now. You can know the person age, house he leave in, etc… Losing all this privacy is becoming scary!!! I came across this article about some bad stories of online privacy[1]
In about 100 years, it is almost guaranty that, we, students in this class won’t be around anymore, but our lives will be digitally available on the web/could!
[1]http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3078835/t/online-privacy-fears-are-real/#.W0gTPtJKgY0
Alekos,
Great post on the advantages and disadvantages to personal data collection from both the perspective of the business and the individual as well as the government. I’m glad you included ways in which individuals can prevent their data from being used unknowingly through VPNs or deletion of cookies. The article below says that lawmakers are reaching to big companies now and asking them to reveal which data they do collect which poses some interesting questions for the future of online data policy and regulation
http://fortune.com/2018/07/09/apple-google-data-collection/
Alekos,
Very interesting topic and point. I know that we are always being tracked even now when I’m making a comment on your post, listening to the music through Spotify and checking my Twitter Facebook(Instagram) several times. And I also know that such data can be used for a bad way as you mentioned. But I cannot help but rely on those software and be tracked because I don’t feel any threat so far in my daily life. Despite the fact that collecting our data can be leading dismal consequences, we hardly understand it. Do you have any good ideas to let people recognize the fear?
Atsuki
Great post, Alekos!
You bring up some very valid points that I hadn’t really thought too much about. Personally, I had always thought that while it is kind of creepy that my search history and a bunch of other personal data were being tracked and recorded online, I didn’t have anything to hide, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But your comments about how such information can negatively affect people in oppressive governments or can be used to build cases against people made a lot of sense.
It reminded me of an article I read for one of my classes last quarter, where the researchers found that information we thought was pretty general about ourselves (such as age, race, zipcode, etc.), when pieced together, could be pretty specific and unique. And by combining multiple, separate data sets that seem private, it is possible to identify specific individuals. Creepy!
Great post,
Very interesting point. I always think that I am being “watched” but never for its consequences. The cons of using the internet that you have mentioned in this post, searching for cancer or for new jobs, are points that made me think more in-depth about the consequences of not having online privacy. I think that a big part of this issue is that internet users, generally, cannot see the mechanisms that spy on them and cannot escape them because they do not enjoy high levels of technological literacy.