Dilemma : Privacy or Function?
Digital Privacy is a hot topic amongst the online hordes today. And the pressure cooker is about to blow with the mega corporations and even governments at loggerheads over something that should be an elementary requirement. After all, shouldn’t every individual have the right to his or her privacy irrespective of their medium of expression?
Let us first dispel the notion that anything we do online is ever private. It is recorded in someplace that is obviously inaccessible to us. It maybe at the ISP, the website, the search engine, the trackers or the host of other servers the request passes through before it reaches us. VPNs can only do so much and possibly the best bet is to use a tor-project solution. However, the moment we reach our handheld devices, whether they be smartphones, tablets or other smart gadgets, we can eliminate the “privacy” option altogether.
Every app that is designed for the device records your activity. It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if it is anonymous. The end result is the developers behind each app have data that can more often than not, uniquely identify you - a digital fingerprint so to speak, and target you with focused and hyper personalized advertisements. And that is just the starting bit. Our phones themselves record information pertaining to the kind of apps we use, what apps specifically, how much time we spend on them, etc., etc. and upload the information to Google or Apple respectively. If the phone was made by another OEM, it will tweaked to send it their way. Then there are the mass surveillance stuff implemented by government agencies to try and (hopefully only for) bring perpetrators of violence and death to justice. After all, information is the gold rush of the 21st century.
Many people do not understand the concerns over sharing their data. The usual arguments are along the lines of “I don’t have anything to hide”, “What could they possibly do with my data”, to “I am okay with sharing my data as long as I get a much better product”, “They subsidize the product with my data as the subsidy”.
Collecting information from a single individual is usually a task that doesn’t beget anything useful. However, mass collection brings in the uniquely tailored branch of statistics that can analyze trends and essentially make profiles that have the ability to figure out everything including some rather obscure like or comment you made a few decades prior. Man is a social animal and needs interactions to build himself up. Everyday his interactions and experiences shape him up to be the future person he becomes. By collecting your current information including whatever you do on your phone, your purchases, your likes and dislikes, the websites you visit and so on, essentially, you are giving them keys to what is your personal castle.
And so we have ourselves a huge dilemma- should we give up our data and help companies subsidize costs or make better products even if they basically have us figured out completely or should we try to achieve at least to the best of our abilities, a possibly private life and companies only have minimal information that can be used to target us - whether it be for advertising or analyzing?
My take, privacy once lost can never be regained and one must make that decision with the utmost care. Despite the intended purposes of say deleting an account from social media websites or any other servers, the data that has been collected would have already been processed. In the future, if you were to create an account with that website again, it is more than likely, that data will be linked back to you. And I for one would love to keep my information of the servers in the data farms because I do not trust anyone but me to use my private, confidential information appropriately. This is again not accounting for the apparently numerous data breaches and hacks into the big corporate farms that inevitably give out the data.
The choice is pretty simple- how much do you value your privacy? Is it tantamount to freedom or is it just another asset you have that can be monetized? Either way, your choice will shape the future.
