Internet Privacy isn’t only for UFO Chasers — It’s time we take it Seriously
Lately I have grown increasingly concerned about how deep the internet giants have crawled into our collective and personal beings. Facebook is in the news about ad buys and evil memes used to elect a bigoted, unqualified celebrity as president. And Google, Apple and Amazon are each on the verge of controlling and trolling our homes as much as they do our internet activities (world domination anybody?). These companies aren’t evil. Let’s get that out of the way. They are just companies trying to make money, and lots of it. We’ve allowed them to become these internet giants by letting them take advantage of our want for free goods and services. They created an ecosystem where data they collect from us becomes the product, and that product is traded in exchange for real money to other companies or people interested in their own business interests. Sure, sounds fair, nothing is free, however, this ecosystem might be damaging the source of the product (us) in ways the architects and engineers did not anticipate. Humans have a natural desire for knowledge and a rich imagination — it’s what separates us from the other species on this planet. In becoming the product, our human fabric is being manipulated by quelling our thirst for new knowledge and silencing our imagination.
Singularity is a concept that has fancied us for a while. It exists when mind and technology become one and I’m sure that will happen in some fashion one day. For singularity to work, and this isn’t about whether the concept is either good or bad, that’s a different conversation — for it to work, technology and the human should be working together. Right now, we are being guided by technology and those that commission the code to manipulate search results and ad serves. If singularity is a utopian concept for many, think of our reality as a technology dependent dystopian construct driven by lonely men who live their parent’s garage. Yes, that was a joke, but this segment of our population can power the election of a US President — and that’s not a joke because it actually happened. If singularity is defined as technology and mind working in tandem, than what is it when person and technology join, but algorithms control the mind and subsequent actions? This seems to be the path we are heading down as we continue to pawn off our personal data and search habits to the internet giants.
Conceptually, internet privacy isn’t all about big government and aluminum foil hats (although that is something we should take seriously as Weird Al demonstrated in the Foil video), it’s also about peace of mind that our decisions are ours, and we made them with information that we sought and discovered on our own without the influence of algorithms that aren’t written in our favor. Google search results and Facebook feeds are curated based on our existing habits. That said, one might argue that any new knowledge obtained by internet search on these platforms isn’t really new knowledge, instead, it’s a part of the feedback loop that serves up ads and variations on our existing knowledge designed for consumption, i.e., click-bait. By only relying on “free” internet services that requires personal data and search history to stay in business, we are pacifying that innate thirst for progress we each contain and cease control in our quest for new knowledge to the purveyors of the algorithms that manipulate our click-habits.
Google will state that they are serving us ads for products they know we are interested in and that are relevant to us. These ads, along with ads provided by affiliate groups, will follow us around the internet from site to site and search to search. And they are right, they know what we want, or at least wanted. They have access to our past search history, they have visibility into our emails, and which websites we visit. We’ve collectively accepted this as the new norm. But is this really healthy? The companies haven’t really turned on us as the conspiracy theorists predict. The code and algorithms are doing what they are supposed to do. The problem here is that we are allowing code to imprison us inside of an invisible cocoon pieced together by our most immediate past and our most intimate desires. Social media is entertaining, but do we really need it to the extent we are using it? Facebook needs us more than we need it. Might there be a better way to remain in contact with our friends and relatives? It’s time we each begin to take internet privacy seriously and make some difficult decisions to cut some cyber-ties before we are unwittingly led further down a path no science fiction author ever anticipated.
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On a personal note, I stopped using Google for most things, and I’m on the verge of deleting my Facebook and Instagram accounts.
And quite honestly, it’s refreshing to have an almost ad and pressure free internet experience. I’m behind the wheel of the information I choose to discover, and I’m not hit by a barrage of cyber-noise when I want to relax.
Regarding tools, Firefox is my browser of choice on mobile and desktop, and I’m using DuckDuckGo for search, which is a fantastic search engine focused on privacy. I’m using FastMail with my own domain for email (this costs $5.00 / month), and Signal for text messaging, which replaces the Google texting apps on my phone. To replace Facebook, I’m in the process of creating a personal blog that will be my personal hub — and to satisfy that social itch I find Reddit wildly entertaining. I will miss a few people on my Facebook feed, but I’ll find a way of keeping in touch with them, which will hopefully lead to healthier relationships.
