The Surveillance State
Do you ever feel anxious when you have to write a workplace blog in front of your colleague or a senior writer? What about shopping in a store that has surveillance cameras, especially if the security officer appears to be paying extra attention?
Consider this on a larger scale. Someone is continually watching you, monitoring your activity around the clock, and gathering your personal information. It gives you the shivers just thinking about it, right? This is exactly what happens in the Surveillance State.
A surveillance state is a country in which the government conducts widespread surveillance of its residents and visitors, using techniques such as video recording systems, internet monitoring, tracking, wiretapping, and so on. State surveillance has become easier and more common as a result of the growing influence of digital technology.
Chongqing in China, the “most surveilled city in the world,” holds roughly one camera for every six of its 30 million citizens.
Different interest groups have had continual arguments about privacy and monitoring. Some people believe that giving up a little privacy for security is worth it, while others are opposing the idea of being watched for the sake of momentary security. However, surveillance state not only infringes on people’s privacy, but it also promotes control over their lives. We’ve been hearing that the government is exploiting this technology to expand its power to spy on citizens or otherwise violate their rights. China tracking Internet activity to detect and censor dissidents, Gulf seeking social media data to stem the tide of the revolts, Vietnamese government using computer viruses to monitor the Internet activity and private data of dissidents protesting government mining policies, and there are more of it. Instead of protecting people from surveillance, data is used to keep specific people in power.
Governments, communists, and dictators are not the only ones who use surveillance. The collection, usage, and sale of personal data generates massive profits for private corporations as well. Behavioral advertising is one of the most common uses of this data nowadays. Companies can track your online actions in order to target advertisements based on certain characteristics, interests, and preferences. Using data sets gathered from the internet, conversation bots can be trained to imitate individual persons. Because tailored communications that appear to be from actual friends, family, and beloved celebrities are more influential than commercials, these bots can be quite effective in altering perceptions and encouraging action.
You’ve probably heard about PRISM and Edward Snowden. PRISM is a code name for a US National Security Agency (NSA) operation that began in 2007 that collects internet communications from numerous US internet firms and key online services such as Gmail, Facebook, Outlook, and others. Six years later, Edward Snowden, the CIA PRISM Program’s system administrator, exposed the program’s aim. He claimed that bulk data collecting was considerably more extensive than the public was aware of, and that it encompassed “dangerous” and “illegal” operations.
So, what can you do as a user on the Internet in this state of surveillance? Here are a few tips and tricks.
- Make sure you read the terms and conditions and privacy policy before signing up for anything.
- To sign in and test the legitimacy of any dubious site, use temporary emails.
- By blocking tracking cookies, you may limit what you give away.
- Only give necessary permissions to any application. (A photo editing app, for example, will not require your location permission.)
- To convey sensitive information, use encrypted messaging apps like Signal, Telegram, Viber, Wire, and others.
- Choose your browser wisely. Google was the first to pioneer surveillance capitalism, and it continues to dominate the market. According to Cliqz, the creator of the Ghostery privacy software, Google collects data on more than 80% of measured web traffic, significantly more than Facebook or anybody else.
- Be informed of the laws of the country in which you reside.
If you work in technology, you can take a few steps to protect your customers’ privacy in the state of surveillance. The first step is to simply ask only what your application requires and to be open to your users. If you’re asking for someone’s birth date, gender, or other personal information, it’s always best to explain why you’re asking and how the information will be used. Check if you’re creating data that users might not want to disclose, or that could have an impact on their future possibilities, or that could jeopardize people’s freedom and reputation. You should provide appropriate privacy concerns and terms and conditions in the UI to be transparent to users. If your data is being shared to other companies, make sure users are well aware of this beforehand. Discover which data sets exist in the organization, which of them are critical, encrypt sensitive data such as passwords. To prevent data from being stolen, lost, or mistakenly destroyed, use data loss prevention (DLP) tactics and tools.
You will almost certainly never be entirely anonymous online, but you may reduce your exposure. Before you do anything online, take a moment to think how your privacy can be compromised — and what you can do to mitigate the risk.
