The six TED videos on our prompt, and others that I watched regarding privacy, make it very clear to me that we are at a dangerous juxtaposition as consumers and citizens in that we have ceded our privacy to the web giants to feed their insatiable desire for ad revenue and also to the government to feed their desire to monitor our every public move-in the interest of our public safety and fighting crime and terrorism. Google and the others will not change their revenue patterns unless they are reigned in by the federal government or some international internet regulatory agency, and our government is currently too preoccupied, ignorant of the workings of the web, and (perhaps) corrupt (at least looking the other way at web privacy abuses) to truly offer any meaningful oversight of privacy collection.
These videos should scare each of us. It is staggering how much information is being gathered about each of us, how we are assisting the gathering by clicking that we have approved the terms and conditions of web sites–to gather as much information on us, keep it forever, and share it with whatever other websites are interested in purchasing our data.
The government is compiling video of our every public move, and unless local city councils set parameters on how long law enforcement can keep the images, they might be kept for one hundred years. There are civil liberties concerns with so many cameras in public places monitoring our every move. There is a legitimate debate on how much saturation of cameras is necessary to aid law enforcement in keeping the peace and dealing with crime/terrorism and how much is simply for control and to quell free speech.
Two of the six speakers discussed the possibility that the search engines
might on their own realize that for the good of mankind they should make
their primary goal protecting their customers’ privacy instead of making
maximum revenue for their stockholders. Given the American penchant
for maximum corporate income/greed, that goal of increased privacy
protection instead of profit seems unlikely to be achieved in the short term!
Juan Enriquez (watch his talk on Youtube) talked about the fact that our social media presence is now for perpetuity (long after our deaths) and that we will always leave a web electronic “tattoo” with large amounts of data that will never go away, so be careful what you put on the web. Finally, there was a video from Darieth Chisolm (watch her talk here on Youtube) with her personal revelation about how she was a victim of cyber stalking and revenge porn and how the internet and law enforcement were impotent to deal with international perpetrators and it took this woman’s perseverance and 13 trips to the courthouse to get adequate protection for herself. Not everyone has that level of determination or her resources.
The entire block of six videos should leave each of us very afraid of the
information that is gathered about us and very hesitant to post personal
photos and information on social media. The only thing social media giants
fear is truly bad publicity. Like rats, they don’t want to be seen in the light.
It will take exposure by “watchdog groups” or some very bad breaches
of security to cause the public to rise up and demand changes. As long
as we can order from Amazon, Paypal or Starbucks in a few moments,
we will disregard the fact that if we audibly speak the phrase “I need to
buy a new white shirt” near our phones that we will receive emails and
our social media will be full of ads for white shirts for days. These videos
did an excellent job of pointing out the many areas of concern. They offered
some solutions which seemed impractical to me. The videos left me very
uneasy about the future of our web privacy.
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