What Happened to Our Privacy Online? Will We Ever Be “Safe”?
Every single piece of information we put online gets stored somewhere, and in my opinion, that is a pretty scary thing to think about. Especially since in recent years and particularly in recent months, during the times of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, people use the internet more than ever!
Tech companies hold all the power…
Looking at some of the largest online companies, the market value of Google (Alphabet) as of April 2nd was $770.34 billion, while Facebook’s net worth was at $450.91 billion. Both of these companies are amongst the top 10 best performing and most powerful companies in the world. But what makes them even more powerful is the fact that they are tech giants and most of what they do is deal with personal information of millions of people from around the world. They have become almost monopolies in their industry. I haven't really thought about Facebook or Google as being particularly “bad” companies, but after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, it made me think much more about my privacy on the internet and that really, this affects everyone who uses social networks or even just the internet in general. Then, looking at Google and even though, compared to Facebook, they haven’t had such a large scale data scandal, there have been several confirmed data breaches, such as in 2018 with Google+. After many scandals that have been following these two tech giants around, people are losing their trust in them, however, that doesn’t stop them from using both of these services on a daily basis.
The first company that pops into mind when thinking about the internet is Google. And I started realizing more and more that Google must know me almost better than I know myself. Of course, I try deleting my search history as frequently as I remember, I clear my cookies regularly, but in reality, that doesn’t even matter because Google collects and keeps every single search that has been made, and that never gets deleted. All of mine and YOUR browsing history are remotely stored somewhere. Our every single move is tracked. I get the chills thinking about how much information this company has on people and imagining it getting released or leaked can be frightening. The more one uses the internet, the less privacy they have. Looking at Facebook, well, they know everything about us. Facebook also owns Instagram and WhatsApp which gives them access to all the information they would ever need about an individual. What happened to privacy? This also raises the question of, will the internet ever be regulated?
Internet regulation?
Ever since 2018, there has been talk about an internet bill of rights by the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, but since then, nothing concrete has been established. Even though data policies such as the GDPR in 2018 or the CCPA which came into effect on January 1st 2020 are good signs of stepping into the right direction, the CCPA is still the ONLY state law that gives customers the right and the power to ask companies to delete their information. How is it possible that, especially in the US, the hub of the world’s largest companies, the home of Silicon Valley, this is still the only state regulation? Within the United States, most companies automatically collect a customer’s data without any questions asked and to change this a user has to actively search to opt-out which can often be hard to find.
According to a report conducted by the Pew Research Center, over 70% of Americans are concerned about how their data is being used by different companies and this is a very high percentage of people to be concerned about something they probably use every single day. This research also showed that people feel like they have almost no control over how or where their information is being used and they are also scared that companies will not admit to misusing or compromising one’s personal information. These results show the lack of trust that users have in these major data companies and if this hasn't been a problem until now, the lack of trust is going to start causing more and more problems eventually. Internet regulation is needed for customers to regain trust in companies holding all their information!
The effects on companies
People give out their personal information every day when signing up for Facebook or an email address on Google, all these services are free which is amazing, but the only problem is, that of course, they are not free because we are giving out our personal data in exchange for the service these platforms provide us with. An internet bill of rights would be a real challenge for so many companies and particularly for data/surveillance companies as it would become much harder for them to obtain personal information.
Companies would perhaps have to try transparency and trying to convince customers in a different way to give them the data they need. It would become much harder to track user behavior and therefore, it would become harder to serve customized or relevant advertisements. This would be a major problem for companies due to the loss of advertising revenue this would cause but they would definitely find a new way to tackle this. The landscape of the world is changing every day and companies deal with it continuously, so this would just be another change that companies would have to solve and I am positive that they would somehow manage. However, this would finally give the users and customers some real power and say about their personal data!
In my opinion…
We are probably still years away from a concrete overall internet regulation applicable to all companies online. Until then, people have to be more careful and more cautious about what information they choose to provide online and overall, how people decide to act online. Of course, there are ways of limiting the unstoppable surveillance by Google or nonstop targeted ads on every web page opened, but for now, that is up to every individual to take their privacy into their own hands and be as careful as possible. How do YOU protect your online privacy?
Thank you!
