I should preface this article by saying, I am aware how easy it is, when speaking about
personal privacy, to sound like a conspiracy theorist. However, that is not the goal of this article, as nothing I am writing is a conspiracy. I am just putting facts on paper.

Imagine, for a moment, that it is common practice for large multinational corporations to tap your telephone; listening in on your interests, and desires; and, in response these institutions place ads outside your window, on billboards along your route to work. They are targeted specifically to you and others like you in your area. In this theoretical, everyone knows that Businesses have this right, and U.S. Government agencies protect it. This bleak Orwellian hypothetical, for many people, is dismal, and totalitarian. So why do we allow these very practices on the internet?

The answer is two-fold, starting with education. People know their rights as American citizens, to privacy in regard to the material world, however almost 70% of Americans, through use of social media, have completely forgone those rights online, because, by in large, they are not informed about the rights they are entitled to. This is largely intentional. The larger problem facing social media consumers, is that people have come to accept the internet as some sovereign place where the laws, and practical sense of the “real world” needn't exist, thanks to the very persuasive illusion of web anonymity.

Let’s start by identifying what “internet privacy,” entails. For practical purposes, the definition can be boiled down to, “an online consumer’s right to personal information, and how that information is distributed to third parties,” (Corporations/ad-marketers/etc.,) and as it stands currently, it does not practically exist. Companies which receive a bulk of their profit using an online platform including Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber, all have sections in their legal agreements (the wall of text where you clicked ‘I Agree’ underneath,) which give them rights to any content posted to their site, posted by a user. For example, look at Facebook’s stance on intellectual property.

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

The bit at the end; “This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it,” is a blatant oxymoron, as the entire point of Facebook's existence is to share content, meaning anything you post is “Shared with others,” meaning, in simple terms, that you do not own any of the pictures you have posted to Facebook and you can not delete them from your wall to terminate Facebook's ownership of your vacation pictures. And it doesn’t stop at photos, as every post, address, tag, poke, video, and character, which you post, belongs to Facebook now, and they choose what to do with it. The same applies for every other company listed above.

Companies smaller than Facebook, use the same tools to learn as much as they can about visitors to their respective virtual dens, however, much more discreetly. One popular tool to gain information on web users, is “cookies.” These bits of code essentially serve as hitchhikers, small and unnoticeable, and are stored in your internet browser, quietly collecting information on browsing habits, and sending that info back to the host companies servers.

I should clarify, that cookies are not illegal, and have practical applications in modern web browsing, including being central to many, more complicated browsing functions, however these stealthy tag-alongs, can be changed from their normal form, which are deleted once the browsing session is closed out, to something called a zombie cookie, which cannot be deleted, and thus, continues collecting information on the user indefinitely; it does this through copying itself to multiple locations on the user's computer.

Now this is the point where the, very reasonable question, comes to mind, “Why does ‘Big Business’ care how I spend my money, and why are they spending so much to figure it out?” Well good question, hypothetical listener. The reason capitalism, and the internet love one another so dearly, is because the internet allows capitalism to do something it has never had the equipment for in the past; it can sell a nonexistent and materially worth less product, all at the illusion of broadening free speech. Facebook, Uber, Instagram, and Twitter, four of the biggest companies online, do not have a product to sell, so instead they sell the user a distorted version of themselves.

The American people have become a grotesque blend of performer and consumer online. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook said,

“Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now.”

And ultimately he's not wrong. You ARE at a disadvantage if you don't buy into the cult of self-idolatry that social media has become.

This is the part of the article I mentioned at the start, where things are going to sound conspiratorial, so bear with me. There is no such thing as personal information, not your location, not your pictures, not anything that could, in some way be worked out linked to your web fingerprint; it's easier than you’d think. With that said, the question becomes, “What do we do?” The answer isn't great. Nothing.

At this point, the Internet, like some digital African country, at the start of the 19th century, has been plundered, divided, and exploited, and you and I are the indigenous people in this analogy. Just like the founder of the largest illegal torrent website in the world, “The Pirate Bay” said in an interview, with Vice,

“The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.”

And maybe he's right, maybe it's broken beyond repair.

Maybe there is no way to expect security, and anonymity, anywhere, anymore.

Ill leave you with this; one more quote from the illustrious Zuckerberg.

“The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'”