Privacy and Data Collection

Our world today online is much different than it was when I was born about 20 years ago. A massive majority of people now use the internet and as a result get data collected about them.

If one does not know this already, companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies that you utilize their products online, track and collect data about you. From Google search histories, to likes on Facebook pages, to what you have written in your cloud-shared Microsoft document, all of the companies can know that.

The effect on us

Some may be perfectly happy with companies knowing this about them as they likely think "what's so bad about it?"

The main way this issue along with many others like it affects us is by causing everyone to have only "15 seconds of being anonymous" as mentioned in the first video with Juan Enriquez. Anonymity is very important to people as people learn, since without it you can't stop people from learning things about you that you rather not let them learn.

For example, let's say you have an irrational fear of fish that you don't want others to know about, but in our day in age with the internet that is quite hard to do. Same thing applies when one applies for a job, as your employer can likely learn a lot from just looking at your online presence on social media or through searches.

From this it is also important to note how we can also learn many things about people we know online, so like Orpheus, maybe you should not look too deeply into your close friends, lover, family, etc.

Also as demonstrated in the second video, this is also not exclusive to the online world either. The police and government are also using this technology to gather data on you and then store it for safekeeping just in case since storage costs are now lower than before.

Finally, in the last video it talks about how aspects of the internet such as revenge porn is problems that need to be addressed as it can happen to anyone as our online civil rights are at stake.

What should the government do?

Well as mentioned the government themselves collect data on us, so I would doubt the government would change much as why would they hinder themselves?

That said, preferably the government should pass privacy laws that increase privacy of everyday people from not only companies, but also from the government themselves would it be online or offline.

People don't take it too kindly to be tracked without their consent, so the government should only allow this collection of data after consent or after enough evidence can be collected to have reasonable doubt (basically a search warrant.)

Outside of those cases, tracking and data collection should not be allowed as it provides too much power to companies and the government while making the individual suffer.

Also as seen in the last video, more legislation needs to be passed to counteract these online threats posed to us as individuals through mediums such as explicit photos, background searches (a popular way of "cancelling" now-a-days), and overall harassment online.

What can we do?

Like mentioned in the first video, everyone can decrease the amount of data about themselves online by being careful about what they post and by refraining from overuse of the internet. Users can also utilize things like duckduckgo or firefox to further increase their privacy.

We can also petition the government to pass laws that help protect our privacy from companies and the government itself as mentioned during the section above.

Video 3 also shows how we can use encrypted technologies like text messages, facetime, and whatsapp to avoid government surveillance, but it is also important to note that this does not fully protect one as there is always backdoors into products such as these.

Finally, the last video mentions that we can take some legal actions against certain online actions, but the results of doing this are heavily varied and also plagued with many legal loopholes and such that cause either cases to go on for much longer than they should or not conclude in the right way at all.