Over the past 20 years, functional, high-speed internet has become increasingly vital for the entertainment and professional work of the human race. People who use it on a regular basis may even feel restless or uneasy if they spend a full day without using; however, what are we sacrificing to use this omnipresent technology that we are addicted to? We frequently share private information on the internet– all this information is stored, analyzed, shared, sold or stolen by the government, or corporate companies, often without our knowledge or consent. The internet has thus become a mine of information that may be seen and used by anyone who is smart enough to access it or has enough money to pay for it. An ordinary visit to the shopping mall or an effortless google search– most of our activities leave data trails and digital footprints (Buchanan et al), giving the internet access to particulars about our lives we may not consent them to have. An uncomplicated creation or deletion of a Facebook account, which requires imparting personal details to their website, may risk our information being sold to sources for purposes such as targeted advertisements. In light of this erudition, we must ask ourselves, is it truly possible to have privacy, let alone digital privacy? It is my postulation that privacy, at least in the world as it exists today, is unfeasible, and corporations and the government would go to any extent to acquire our information and utilize it for their gain.
Primarily, why should privacy be a fundamental right? A crucial reason is that numerous of their interests could potentially be endangered if their privacy is violated. For example, with the help of basic information, figuring out a person’s social security number does not remain rocket science. Several people assume that their social security numbers are randomly assigned, however this is mere hearsay. There is a procedure for this– the first three digits of this number are always the code of the state in which this number was acquired and the second two numbers determined by the region or county within the state; the rest of this operation is explained on the social security administration website, which is an open website and can be accessed by anybody without permission. Therefore, to determine a person’s social security number, their date of birth and hometown is required, information that can be obtained from various websites. (The SSN Numbering Scheme)
If a person were able to get hold another person’s social security number, they could do irreversible damage such as filing a fraudulent tax refund, committing crimes in their name or stealing their benefits (Identity Theft and Your Social Security Number). Thus, the common man should care immensely about their privacy. Another reason why citizens should be concerned about their privacy is that incomplete data taken out of context could harm their reputation in court or other crucial situations. For example, a person who withdraws five hundred dollars every Saturday from their bank account and goes to a casino the same night, could be accused of gambling; to their neighbour, this information may not be useful, but to companies hiring them, it may be. In reality, the person prefers using cash over a card, and could go to the casino to eat food because they enjoy the lighting and vibes. Hence insufficient data collected without a person’s consent could paint them to be someone they are not and potentially harm them.
The right to privacy is pivotal to maintain human dignity, and the government must preserve each individual’s right to decide whether their information is collected and shared to protect its citizens from exploitation. However, what happens when citizens are spied on by their own government? In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, the American government passed the USA Patriot Act marking the beginning of an era of extreme invasion of its citizens privacy, without their awareness. According to this act, the government possessed the right to snoop on their citizens for the purpose of monitoring and terminating terrorism. In 2013, Edward Snowden, an ex-CIA systems analysts, revealed information that horrified not only the entire United States of America, but the entire world (BBC). He leaked documents about a secret mass surveillance program that the US government was running. According to the leaks, the US court had passed a secret order that forced Verizon to surrender all telephone data to the National Security Agency (NSA), on a daily basis. These leaks also disclosed that the NSA tapped into servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google and Microsoft to collect data such as search history, emails, file transfers and live chats. An appalling estimate of twenty million dollars per year was required to run this mass surveillance program– and even more disturbingly, all of this money came out of taxpayers’ pockets. Hence essentially, the government gave itself the capability to pry on its people and then used the same people’s money to violate their own privacy.
While US constitution does not explicitly entitle its citizens to privacy, the fourth amendment implies it; according to this amendment, “a person has the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”(Fourth Amendment, cornell) This amendment clearly expresses a person’s privilege to be “secure” against “unreasonable searches”, then why is it so that the government searches its citizens activities at all times? The fourth amendment implicitly ensures that personal emails, medical records, bank details, etc. remain safe from prying eyes, however the government ignored this.
In his final months in the office, President Obama passed a privacy bill that would prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Verizon, Comcast etc.from sharing or selling people’s web browsing history and other sensitive information without their consent(Snider Mark). Under this new bill, all ISP’s required their users’ consent to share or sell their data.
However, before this bill could see the light of the day, President Trump revoked it (Snider Mark). As a businessman, he understood the profits involved in selling information, thus allowing companies like Verizon to sell without permission under the USA Patriot Act. The information possessed by ISP’s include user browsing history, financial records, etc.; a user’s web browsing history could hold utmost importance as it could embarrass them socially. While the US government remains one of the biggest customer of this information, majority of this information is sold to advertisement companies who analyze it and target you with advertisements that would specifically appeal to you. In the words of Edward Snowden, “Sometimes the scandal is not what law was broken, but what the law allows,” and the US government is exemplary of this– privacy has become an absurd and non-existent concept (Mittal).
Several other multinational companies Google and Facebook utilize this act to its benefit.
Until recently, Google used to scan Gmail for information to target its users with advertisements (Wakabayashi). Google has been scanning Gmail since 2004, when it was introduced. According to Seth Schoen, a senior staff technologist from the Electronics Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, since 2004 regular people who used Google services disliked the way their email content were being used to target ads but Google did not pay any attention to these concerns. He also says that Google decision to stop scanning emails was based on current or prospective paying enterprise customers were uncomfortable with this practice. Although Google has decided to stop scanning email content, they are still going to collect, analyze and use data from other services like Youtube. Another big corporation that tracks and collects user data is Facebook. This social-networking site is free to use monetarily, but payment is made in the form of personal information– there is no free lunch. It not only collects data from its social-networking platform, but also collects data from any net page that fell under the ‘Facebook.com’ domain. It uses cookies, a simple text file which can track a number of user activities, to do so. Any individual who visits a website that has Facebook “like” button, or is in any way related to Facebook, will have this cookie installed into their browser without their awareness. Facebook then uses this information to target the user with ads based on their web history, and as advertising revenue is its biggest source of income, all the information it collects is very valuable to them. Therefore, in deduction, corporations will go to any extent to earn more money, even if it means to violate people’s privacy, especially when the law allows it.
Everytime you swipe your credit card, your transaction is tracked. There are surveillance cameras in every store and street. Your employer tracks your emails and the NSA owns your phone. We are living in a society where our houses don’t have any walls and there is not we can do about that. Anything we do is being recorded and then stored in an open storage facility where anyone can access it.