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Your (Lack of) Internet Privacy

 “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.”

-       Edward Tufte

 

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

 

When it comes to the sanctity of your digital privacy, I don’t even know where to begin on the rapidly increasing list of exploitations. 

 

A commonly touted phrase around Silicon Valley goes, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” The truth is, you aren’t giving Facebook any money – advertisers are. So who might the app really designed to best serve? You, or their customers?

 

The goal of these tech giants is not to make Google, Twitter, or Instagram into the “best” app they can – it’s to collect as much attention into one spot as they can figure out how to. Every feature is a means to that end: attention, not satisfaction.

 

Social media websites are advertiser-funded fly traps, designed not to help us, but merely to squeeze as much attention from our day as possible. The big question: how are these companies supposed to predict what will attract the most users? The answer: lots, and lots, of data.

 

Many people erroneously assume that it’s that data being collected from us that’s the product. While there are massive data brokers that specialize in exactly that, many of the major tech companies are interested in a much different goal: prediction power. With such an ability being a direct factor of the amount of data you can feed your algorithms, there is immeasurable financial incentive for companies to violate your privacy in every legal (or illegal) way they can.


Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

 

Many of us are quite sure that, while this is a big issue, we aren’t actively succumbing to the will of tech giants. The truth is, just like magicians with a deck of cards, our feeds provide us with a convincing illusion of choice, while deceptively leading us directly where they intend the entire time. In the industry, this design philosophy is known as “persuasive technology,” and it has been dominating Silicon Valley standard playbooks for the last decade. As many of us have likely experienced personally, this has created an apparent disparity in concern over privacy between generations. Young people who have grown up with these technologies don’t know a world other than one where the very concept of communication is inseparably bound to deceitful manipulation at the hands of a third party; priming an entire generation to be more willingly complacent in their own undoing. 

 

As a final note, I must stress the extent to which this short article barely scratches the tip of the Internet privacy iceberg. If you’d like to learn more, I cannot recommend the Netflix original documentary “The Social Dilemma” enough – though certainly not without its valid criticisms, it is by far the most comprehensive, unsettling piece I’ve seen on the issue for being as relatively succinct as it is. 

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