I am a Communication Electronic Media/Broadcasting major, so the internet is kind of a big deal in my line of studying, but this past week in my Mass Communication in Society class we looked at the internet in a different light. For out homework, we, as a class, participated in a week long study of sorts through WNYC's podcast "Note To Self." This study was called the "Privacy Paradox." Every day for five days we were sent an email with an activity to complete and a podcast episode to listen to. These are the things my eyes were opened to.
Day one. We were told to go into our phone settings and see what applications had access to things such as out location, microphone and photos. It was baffling what apps had access to these things that did not require them to function, but did require them to be downloaded onto your phone. Apps that had access to my location included the app store, my calendar, messages, Siri, etc. Granted it is helpful for some to have access to my location, such as the weather app and maps, but not all the time. I changed the settings from always on to never or only when using, changing my phone from tracking me all the time to only when I allowed it to and knew about it. Even after changing those settings though, your phone can still track you and see everywhere you have been up until you changed those settings. You have to clear your location history to be completely sure.
Day two. We got online and learned about add tracking through social media and how individuals are categorized through what they like on Facebook and other forms of social media and how the websites you visit track you and pop up as adds in your social media. Even if you only looked at the website once, for five minutes, it can still track you. Did you know that Facebook has over 52,000 sub-categories to define its users? Including racial affinity, which is what race you seem to identify more as based on your likes and friends and search history. Isn't that crazy? Our assignment was to use the software they had provided us and see how secure our browser and computer/phone were, seeing who could track us, how unique our technological fingerprint was, and how we could fix it. Did you know those "cookies" websites tell you about are how they track your activity? We were instructed to install a tracking blocker called Badger that stopped the tracking by, "eating the cookies." Some websites I had to partially block or unblock completely because they would not load properly without being able to track me in some way.
Day three. The assignment for this day was to see how well the internet really knew us by using our Facebook in a tool called Apply Magic Sauce from the University of Cambridge. If you didn't have Facebook, there was also an option for a writing sample. This would take your likes, your friends, the posts you had shared, your original posts and run it through an algorithm. The results were scary accurate for me. People in my class said that it knew things about them they they didn't even put on their Facebook, like religious affiliation or political views. One young lady eve said, "It described it the exact same way I describe it to others." when referring to its knowledge of her political standing. It even went has far as telling you your Jungian personality type and how intelligent you were compared to the rest of the population. It even guesses your sexual orientation based on your likes.
Day four. In a world consumed with being heard and being active on the internet, our challenge on day four was to sit quietly without any technology for 15 minutes and be anonymous. The exact opposite of our "15 minutes of fame." On this day we learned that there is a psychological necessity for privacy, that having something to hide was a good thing. That is not so much the case today. Everything is on the internet. We no loner have our private lives in such a public society. We heard from the executive producer of the Bachelor, Elan Gale. He told us that because of his job, practically invading others's everyday privacy, he knew the importance of having alone time, of being by yourself with no one watching. For this reason he has very little, if any at all, personal social media. He keeps his life out of the spotlight. If he can, why can't we?
Day five: the last day. Sir Tim Burners-Lee, the inventor of the World-Wide Web, or the www before each web address, told us of his view for the future of the internet. He says that one day companies will have to ask individually for access to our information, and will only be able to use it for what they ask access for. Now Burners-Lee might have been pretty smart for inventing the Web, but I'd say he's pretty naive if he believes this idea is even a real possibility. Too much information is already out there and too many people already have access to it for this idea to ever become a reality. But we can individually change who has access to our information. That was our final activity, to create our own Terms of Service for our use of the internet, deciding what was best for us, what privacy meant to us, what we were willing to post, on an individual level. My terms of service are not the same as anyone else's. They may be similar,but not the same.
This brings me to a question many may be asking. What is the privacy paradox? The paradox is that we are so willing to give up our information in the name of convenience, but get so upset when these companies have access to them. We are willing to give up our privacy in the name of government safety and protection of individual rights, but will there be any rights left to protect? Think about these things next time you get online, or geo-tag your photos from vacation, or give an app access to your phone's entire memory. Is giving up your privacy really worth losing your identity? Are we becoming Aldous Huxley's feared "A Brave New World"?
