A look at internet privacy from the perspective of a college student's perspective. The dangers, the perks, and what you can do about it. We'll be looking at a number of things, the first of which will be the fact that I won't really be continuing in such a monotonous tone. (I'm fairly certain it was read that way, that or in the soothing voice of Morgan Freeman) To that I say nay. It's a matter of preference really. I prefer not to talk like I'm slightly autistic. Just like I prefer to keep my phone not in my pocket for fear of getting ball cancer from the ridiculously high amounts of energy my phone puts out. Sure it might seem a little strange at first, but we'll see who's little friends are still concocting ways of escaping my body versus figuring out ways to grow uncontrollably and eventually kill me. (Hint: I will be the former.)
Today, I want to talk a bit about a little something called internet privacy. While I'm sure some of us start thinking of the literal definition of internet privacy, undoubtedly complete with a set of references; I'd like to think that most of us thought about setting our Facebook profiles to private so Creepy-McStalker can't do unspeakable things to himself with that picture of you playing drunken monkey kung fu on his browser. However, the sad fact is that even that incredibly creepy image still has not motivated a large number of people to actually take into consideration who can see their Facebook profile. While quite a persuasive argument for internet privacy in its own right, some of you may not necessarily care who can see your Facebook profile (in which case I commend you for your bravery and lack of an uncontrollable and active imagination that would lead to endless nights of sleeping with the light on) and for that crowd I offer a hypothetical situation.
Let's suppose that you are lacking in any protections for your Facebook profile. Let's look at hypothetical person named Mr. Mark Zee. Mark Zee doesn't think that internet privacy is all that important and chooses to leave his profile open to the public. In that instance, I now have his gender, his location, his name, his age, as well as members of his family and friends. I can see where he works, and a quick look at his posts will probably give me some information on his favorite books, movies, music, and maybe even who his pets are. Mr. Mark Zee has given out a lot of personal information to the public. From here, it's not much of a hop, skip, and a jump to find out where he banks. Now, considering Mr. Mark Zee is likely not super secure about his information, a quick google search would be all that it took to get any information that might be missing to fill in the blanks. What now? Now we look into the password recovery option for the email that we got from your Facebook page and would you look at that! Mark's security question is the name of his high school, that happens to be listed as well! Well now we have access to Mark's email which, conveniently, has a number of other juicy bits of information, the least not of which being the location of where Mr. Mark Zee's online bank account password is sent in the event of a forgotten password. Within a matter of minutes, we've now accessed Mark's account.
Of course, this is all in the realm of hypothetical. Nothing like this could ever really happen, right? Oh wait, it already fucking did. A man named Herbert H. Thompson, with permission, managed to break into an acquittance's bank account with free access. Did he do any amount of hacking? Nope. He managed to find everything that he needed to know from what was already online, basically mining the internet for bits of information. Information that was not kept very well hidden or secured.
Now I'm sure that several of you are a bit freaked out by this - I know I was - and as such are contemplating the actual security of your bank account right now. Maybe some of us might reflect upon Mark Zuckerberg's interview back in January of this year and Facebook's attempts to push everyone's information into the public eye. In his interview, Mark Zuckerberg points out that people have gotten more comfortable sharing their information online with others thus their reasoning behind forcing everyone to automatically make their information public. Here is where Facebook stumbled.
The important thing is not so much that we don't want anyone knowing our information, or that we are completely comfortable with anyone knowing our information, it's that we want to be able to choose who can see our information. It's the happy middle ground that people are truly comfortable with. People are clearly not comfortable letting anyone view their information as shown by the severe backlash suffered by Facebook once this change went into effect. The ability to choose is what's important, and when social networking corporations take that away, we aren't happy about it.
To be perfectly fair though, Facebook has done an excellent job of picking itself up again. Their privacy controls, though obscure, are not as invasive and forceful and while they continue to push those boundaries of internet privacy they are doing a good job of listening to the voice of the people.
This is where you come in. Truth be told, you might be anywhere on the spectrum from desiring completely free reign of information in exchange for convenience to wanting absolute control of your information regardless of how much it inconveniences you. I'd gander that most of us are somewhere in the middle, but whatever the case the things that we can all agree on is that it is vital that we are given the choice to control what is happening with our information rather than Facebook or any other corporation being able to decide exclusively how they want to use our information. That choice, being able to make that decision, is worth fighting for.
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