The Truth About Online Privacy

As I mentioned in an earlier post, when it comes to the Internet and online privacy, it is important for everyone to know that online privacy doesn't actually exist. Many of us think it exists or that our rights protect us from this, but in reality, it doesn't and companies continue to have the ability to share and sell our data with third-party groups. Over the past 25 years, the Internet forever changed our lives and changed how we and the rest of the world communicate. However, as the internet becomes more and more imperative in our daily lives, our personal privacy online starts to become less personal.

In one TEDtalk, the speaker, Juan Enriquez, compared our online personal information to tattoos. Similar to tattoos, our personal information tells a lot of stories about us. Essentially this makes our online personal information our "electronic tattoos." Because of this, our data is valuable to them as they can use this information to either sell us specific products towards our taste or sell this data to other third party companies that can do whatever they want with it. The use of facial recognition on both our faces and our cars' license plate also brings a lot of worries as this technology can be used to quickly identify the person and bring up everything from their social media accounts to their criminal records. Thanks to this technology, we have become less anonymous and because of the internet, our data will still available even after we're gone.

During my freshman year of college, I wrote an essay about the illusion of online privacy and how companies and governments use our data to either use it against us or to make a profit. In my paper, I mentioned how many Americans believe that a company's privacy policy is useful and that they are there to ensure that your private information will be protected and not used by the company. However, privacy policies actually do the opposite effect. Instead, those privacy policies are there to disclose to you what they'll do with your information and that everything they can do with it is perfectly normal and legal. Plus, companies intentionally make their privacy policies lengthy and complex because they know that most Americans don't read them anyway. One example that I gave was how Target does it. In my example, I talked about how Target, with its illusion of a helpful privacy policy, gain people's personal information and shopping history from their website only, so that Target can use it to not only recommend specific products to you but also use it to easily market it and sell your information to third party companies as well.

Sources:
https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_your_online_life_permanent_as_a_tattoo
https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surprisingly_dangerous_detail_the_police_track_about_you
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550955416/GIC?u=hpu_main&sid=GIC&xid=4450d158