Just How Secure Is Our Online Privacy?

The idea that you are being watched by an unknown figure or entity is always a scary thought and or feeling. I mean, there are some nights where I am walking out of my living room to go upstairs to get ready bed, and as I do so, I walk past the windows located throughout the house that are seemingly covered with the blackness of nighttime. I know that the chances of somebody watching me from there are slim, but I’ve seen enough horror films to know that it’s technically a possibility, and I often can’t help but think to myself, “someone could be staring right at me, watching me ever move”. It always seems to cause me to put a little extra effort and speed into my legs as I head up the stairs. What’s interesting about this is that even though the chances someone is actually watching me from the windows are slim, I still get that feeling more often than when I browse the internet, or search something on google, where there is probably a higher chance of someone virtually spying on my online data.

We all put some our most personal and imitate information online. Some of it we put on their because we have to for our jobs or to buy needed products. Others we put on the internet willingly and happily because technology has made making personal connections and spreading your personal identity easy and fun. No matter the reason, the privacy that we have is always going to be subject to being compromised by an outside figure. The online black market has plenty of scammers and hackers working hard to gather, buy, and sell people’s personal identities. It’s becoming more and more frequent to the point where it seems that our personal info and data is so accessible to outsiders that our online identities are becoming devalued. In Maria Dubovitskaya’s TedTalk, she explains how one’s phone number, name, date of birth, email address and more had diminished in value over the past ten years on the black market, from being worth 150$ combined to less than 1$ online. And she explains how this is often because we’ve all gotten so comfortable with sharing personal information over the internet. I think we all can relate to this in some way. We’ve all been pushed towards using the internet to get things done from home that we used to have to go out and do in person that we’ve just learned to accept that putting our information out online is a necessity to enable the benefits that technology offers. What’s so scary is that we could get so comfortable that we eventually don’t care about our privacy online at all.

However, the black market isn’t the only thing to be worried about with online privacy, as the government has a lot of interest and investment into on and offline spying. Systems and corporations linked with the government focus on keeping track of precise locations and movements, and these TedTalks discuss this. What’s interesting about the government invading your privacy online and offline is that the argument is that they are doing it for the widespread benefit and protection of the public. The idea that setting up these systems where the government can track your every move by identifying license plates via webcams helps them track the bad guys who would commit crimes. The government seems to have the right intentions, but what’s scary is that they aren’t completely secure just because they are the government. Like the Tedtalks said, we all use the same computers and smartphones with similar security measurements. Governments may have more well-equipped security measures, but are certainly susceptible to online hacks, such as in the 2016 election. All in all, it seems like privacy is a hard thing to be 100% assured of.

Obviously with all that I’ve previously mentioned, privacy online is certainly a hot-button issue, especially as we are currently all stuck inside in the midst of a global pandemic. I was interested in what we can do exactly to enhance our privacy strength. Derek Banta’s TedTalk provided some insight on this, saying that rather than putting out more personal info to more online sources, we put all our info into a backed-up, trusted third party resource, which would create more anonymity. Instead of going directly to the source, the third party would do it for you, giving an anonymous avatar. This is such an interesting idea. It takes a lot of the value of our individual purposes from the eyes of someone on the Black Market. Banta shows that although there is a lot stacked against us in terms of complete privacy, we still can create the measures necessary to ensure more safety online, which I believe is going to continue to grow into a more pressing issue.

https://www.ted.com/talks/maria_dubovitskaya_take_back_control_of_your_personal_data#t-179284

https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_banta_what_if_our_data_could_be_protected_online#t-186767

https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surprisingly_dangerous_detail_the_police_track_about_you

https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_soghoian_how_to_avoid_surveillance_with_the_phone_in_your_pocket