Well Informed #2

Privacy 2.0

When you google "Privacy Online", the first couple of posts are things like, "the top ten best ways to improve online privacy" or "Using the internet safely" when in reality, there is no privacy online. This has been drilled into my head by parents, friends, and professors. Growing up, my family always told me to be careful of what I put on the internet because it can never be taken down, even if you delete the original post. And I believe that is becoming clearer and clearer as time goes on. 

A title caught my attention in my search for what 'online privacy' really meant when I found The Illusion of Online Privacy  from USNews. They brought up a somewhat recent hack from AshleyMadison.com. For those that didn't hear about this, AshleyMadison.com is a website that allows married or committed people to meet and hook up with other committed people. In this case, a hacker was able to leek users names, addresses and card payments. 

In fact, in 2016 the number of U.S. data breaches hit a record high of 1,093. A 40% increase since 2015 with only 780 data breaches. This raises the question of how truly private our information is online. If 1,093 data breaches were actually detected, how many do you think happened undetected? 

However, data breaches from online hackers are not the only sort of monitoring the internet does either. Have you ever been looking on Amazon for a specific item and a few hours later be scrolling through facebook and see an ad of the items you'd been looking at? Or an ad from a separate website of similar items? According to Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Arvind Narayanan, "What this technology is really good at doing is following you from site to site, tracking your actions and compiling them into a database, usually not by real name, but by a pseudonymous numerical identifier. Nevertheless, it knows when you come back, and it knows to look you up, and based on what it has profiled about you in the past, it will treat you accordingly and decide which advertisements to give you, sometimes how to personalize content to you, and so on." 

I found this information extremely interesting as I've always wondered how what I had been searching for shows up in my daily feed. Its insane to think that our technology is so far developed that based on the websites I visit and the posts I make, the internet, or rather the cookies on the internet, can trace and create my profile that matches fairly close to who I actually am and what I actually like. 

In all honesty, I'm not as surprised by the amount of data breaches I found or the fact that advertisers are able to track what I like. I think its become an assumed risk we all take when we go online. It does slightly worry me with the amount of breaches we've had and the steady incline that will probably take place , however I know there's not really much we can do about it. The government is spying on us, advertisers are spying on us, even our facebook friends do a little stalking from time to time. In all honesty, who isn't spying on us? I think that the facade of having online privacy is a sham and we should all adjust the way we think of it. A facebook post announcing you don't authorize the use of your information is not going to stop someone or something from using it. Instead, being more cautious of the information we put online will give us a small ounce more of privacy. It may not be much, but it is something.