Social networking and the paradoxical world of privacy

Posted by Mary S in SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY // 0 Comments

As technological developments get better each time personal privacy seems to be a thing of the past. Having the debate is controversy itself considering the players of huge corporations, elites and governments involved. The question is if we are so worried about our privacy why would we choose to share our data, but most of everything we do today involves giving information whether socially at work or at home.

The actions of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowdon caused a huge turmoil when he revealed that the United states National security agency had been ears dropping from the most basic to the most intimate information on everyday individuals around the globe, that much information could only be gathered with the ultimate technology that already exists. Technology empowers power to the right groups and individuals each to their interior motives.

To look on the broader scale, we search billions of words on the biggest search engine Google revealing our private thoughts, our secrets, our age, gender, geographical location, our sexual preferences and our habits hobbies thus creating tracking, manipulate algorithms and each type we do reveals an exact description of an individual which makes tasking A.I easy and with Facebook having millions of users across the world collecting data to predict likelihoods of civil disobedience, religious intolerance and government protests makes our very next move predictable giving rise to certain governments and law police to arrest, target and monitor an individual or groups just for displacing our own thoughts and manipulating voters. Google themselves admitted that the use of algorithms pays a significant part in a users vote and by predicting messages and filtering content google can influence an election to go a certain way.

Recently the department of homeland security (DHS) expanded their social media monitoring programs, while its justification is in the name of national security its far fetched the surveillance of people plays a huge role and the United nations human rights admitted there was a disturbing lack of transparency in the need for global digital surveillance.

The paradoxical world of our own privacy is no longer ours but belong to the people who have a cause to control the human population, corporation giants such as NSA, google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook also work along one another sending and receiving all kinds of data resulting in one huge database leading to a rise in policies to be based from the likes of Bill Gates to develop Identification Chips (I.D) on us held with us all the time or under our skin whether by willingness or by force and with a collaboration from the world monitoring us ever so more by cyber security every time we take a walk, shop or enter a building, matching a face to a huge collection database monetised is a few clicks away already undergoing in countries such as China. An individual is never alone any more, we have become a ghost of our own shell controlled, monitored by the watching big brother eventually leading to total population control of our health’s,our wealth’s, who has been vaccinated, criminal records, our preference to clothes and foods and much more. It is fortunate that at the moment we have laws restricting the use of wiretaps, and protecting medical records but the extent that is revealed underhand is not known, after all big corporations with big bucks buy data and access, the extent of data they have on us lies with the incumbent government and power big rich companies.

Individuals and groups who take a backlash to such concept or ideas and reveal the extent of the information available on an individual get sentenced such as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, any information relating to him be it shared, posted and discussed will get you banned and censored and considering the constant change on YouTube’s recent policies it has recently had an uproar of people who claim YouTube are demonetising their videos and censoring them due to certain spoken words known as free speech on any matter of subject deemed too sensitive.

All information is at one place using different platforms, any argument with them sees an individual question their own actions as the data given voluntarily by individuals in the first place should not matter because a person giving their information consciously decides to disclose it and generally does so in exchange for certain products, accesses and services. Never the less huge mass of raw data of millions of people around the world is a goldmine to a very few who will use it for their own agendas, we are basically handing a leash to our own dog collars.

Published by: Mary S (Editor)