Skip to main content

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. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where did the Anti-War movement go?

Photo by  Stijn Swinnen  on  Unsplash   Being born in the year 2000 gives me an interesting, warped perspective on U.S. foreign occupancy and the concept of “war” in general.    Without a doubt, both the World Wars and the Vietnam War seem like some of the most hellish, gut-wrenching low points in human history. It’s really hard to overstate how disturbing it was learning about the conditions of these conflicts.  Operation Wandering Soul  was infamously used by the U.S. as a tactic of psychological warfare; content warning, listening to the “ ghost tapes ” can be genuinely disturbing. If you’ve got the time, here’s a captivating clip of a Vietnam vet recounting his experience oversees, and specifically how it differed from the narrative Americans were being fed back home:   In my mind, it’s quite understandable that such conflicts were met with passionate anti-war movements. When I look around now, however, there’s nearly  no  discu...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Failure of the Modern Marketplace of Ideas

Photo by  Markus Spiske  on  Unsplash   Fair warning: there is no hiding my personal politics on this one. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the concept of the Marketplace of Ideas. It’s hard  not  to, when arguably living in the most information-accessible period in all of history, wonder how we find ourselves divided into strict camps, all equally, intensely convinced of  entirely  perpendicular realities of the world. Even after Trump’s presidency is over, it’s depressingly clear that his reign over the willing minds of millions of Americans will continue. It’s also clear that no matter who’s in the White House, morally-bankrupt pawns like Giuliani will continue to spew unhinged, unfounded propaganda for however long it keeps them relevant. They are not doing this in a void – millions of people are listening to and  believing  in their lies, deepening the rift between citizens to a dangerous level. Globally, there are instances ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Diffusion of Music Streaming

  Photo by  Heidi Fin  on  Unsplash   For the last hundred or so years, give or take, $10 has just about always bought a single album. $10 vinyl records, $10 cassette tapes, and though CDs became a bit more expensive, iTunes eventually returned to a $10 average offering for their novel service. Now, for the same price, I get access to just about every song ever published, whenever I want. How did we get here?   When Spotify first arrived on the scene offering a service to stream your favorite songs from the internet, it felt like a weird, impractical way to pay for your music. I have to  keep paying ? And  never  actually own it? Yeah, I think I’ll pass. And I wasn’t alone – it took Spotify  more than two years after launch to convince any A series investors  that the music business could be fruitful.   However, being the grubby little new-tech-lover I was, it wasn’t long before I found myself asking for a Spotify subscription ...
Post a Comment
Read more