Does your information privacy matter?

Through out the last decades, many social media platforms have grown in a tremendous exponential rate. Best explanaiton for such growth is the use of algorithms that manipulates and stores all of the information provided by the users for a profit. The documentary mirrors various points, we had previously learned in class. Such as digital enclosure, contextual advertising and interactivity.

Siva Vaidhyananthan, author of “The Googlization of everything” expresses  the idea of digital enclosure. He states that although it seems like” Google is free , which is part of the reason why we like the company, google is not really free- at least not free in a liberty sense”. I can relate this statment to digital enclosure, since it’s the concept of  an interactive platform in which every transaction and move of the user is being recorded. Which then leads to two separate groups; the private organizations controlling the information of the users, and the  users of such platforms. Unfortunatemely this information is not just being used for marketing purposes, our government is also paying search engines, and social media platform for our virtual transactions.

The relation between the economic systems and the system of government control is such of companies like Facebook, Google or instram which purposely make their privacy policy not user friendly to then collect data from users and sell it forward to the government. Because of this the distribution of power is uneven. It connects back to what we learned in class about interactivity. Interactivity is no longer a symmetrical two way street, insted it is an asymmetrical loss of privacy. Users are becoming more and more transparent, not voluntarily but by default. While all the surveillance agencies remain hidden and secretive.

The users well being and freedom are being affected by the asymmetrical interactivity as it is evident in the next three examples from the documentary.

1. One of the stories that really shocked me was the story of the Law student from Europe. Part of the reason why I found it so interesting is that the story first begins stating how the government of Austria, requires company to be transparent unlike the USA. Because of this the law student was able to request information about all of his virtual transactions from Facebook. Although he had been using Facebook infrequently for only three years, much information was inspired from him to determine many things, such as places he had visit through that period of times, what political party he supports, he was able to find comments and conversations he had made, even more surprisingly he realized that when one of the users delete Facebook, it doesn’t mean that it is deleted, is never gone, the user just never sees it. Although this did not affect his physical well being, I’m sure he felt his freedom was being oppressed. After realizing someone is always watching.
2. Another scene that i found really interesting was the scene of Carrier IQ. Carrier IQ, according to the documentary, is a piece of software that every smartphone possessed. This software capture every single key stroke. Then the documentary shows a debate in congress where the head of the FBI admits that although information collected for criminal cases was not directly obtained from Carrier IQ, some of the information coming from wireless carrier might come from Carrier IQ. This shows us how developed the world of surveillance is, you no longer have to be involve in social media platforms , or even used search engines to be virtually tracked.
3. The story of Joe Leopardi was really shocking to me. Joe had made a post on Facebook quoting a movie scene he was currently watching, the quote display some terms of mass destruction weapons. The same day of the status being posted, the police showed up at his house, without a warrant or anything searched through his property. Not only was his freedom violated but that situation could have also affected his physical well being.