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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Living with the Data Vultures
-- By NatayaRahmawati - 11 Mar 2022
The ever-evolving development of internet and computer technology have transformed the way humans communicate with each other, as well as how businesses and the government interact with people. Technology and internet have been used in an unprecedented way for tracking, marketing and informing policies. Nowadays, what supposed to be our private data could be collected and even used against us unlawfully. The examples could be observed on how Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles and engineered those data to provide analytical assistance to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Donald Trump, as well as the case where police in Virginia violated the Constitution by analyzing location data of Google users near a 2019 bank robbery, and also. Judge M. Hannah Lauck of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said Thursday that the so-called geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches by accessing users’ location data without probable cause they might be suspects.
Behind this escalated use of technology lays incredibly important issues: Why do we care about privacy and how do we protect it?
Personal Data Privacy: Specifying Why It Matters
The right to privacy is the right not to have one's personal matters disclosed or publicized; the right to be left alone. It is the right against undue government intrusion into fundamental personal issues and decisions.
Privacy is crucial to freedom of thought, it unlocks the aspects of ourselves that are most intimate and at the same time most vulnerable. People who don’t have the best interest at heart will exploit our private data to further their own agenda. Privacy matters because the lack of it gives others power over us.
At this point many people might still think that they do not have to put much concern over data privacy because they think that they are nobody and thus their privacy is safe, nothing special, interesting, nor important to be known about them.
Plenty people do not have awareness over data privacy because they thought as an ordinary citizen their privacy is safe; nothing special, interesting, nor important to be known about them. This is an ill narrative. Each of us have our attention and presence of mind, we have plenty to hide and plenty to fear. The data vultures want to know more about us so they can know how to best influence every aspect of our life. In terms of business and economics, the more personal data being collected by the big tech companies, the more they can anticipate every move that we take, influence us, and sell that influence to others. However, the real danger of data privacy breach is not merely about influencing us to spend money on stuff, but the huge possibilities that our information can so easily accumulated by the hands of parties whose motives are much less noble. A government, for example.
The mass agglomeration and analysis of personal data has empowered governments and prying companies. Governments today know more about their citizens than ever before. Intelligence agencies now possess much more information on all of the population. This kind of information allows governments the ability to subconsciously controls how we perceive information and policy, manipulate our behaviour, and worse, it enables them to foresee protests and even pre-emptively arrest people who plan to take part. Having the power to gain knowledge about organized resistance before it occurs, and being able to squeeze it in time, is a tyrant’s dream.
Where to Put Our Concern
Lack of controls over our personal information, being tracked and monitored by companies and the government are the reality that we are living in. It is omnipresent, in every activities that we do from the moment that we open our eyes to the time when we sleep at night. Unless we are willing to put resistance into it, the data vultures will endlessly abuse their power to harvest our data to the point that we would be left with no choice but to give up privacy altogether. It is possible that at one point, the deceitful convenience of digital age goes from ‘only’ broadcasting our private lives through surveys and social media to the compulsory regulation to put all of our personal data online, without other mechanism where our data could be stored more safely. (E.g. census has been conducted online, schools reduced into a mere zoom session where everything is recorded, all without the guarantee of data security).
The abuse of power in relation to surveillance evoke the notion that power needs to be curtailed for it to be a positive influence in society. Even if you still think that there is nothing wrong with what tech companies and governments are doing with our data, we should still want power to be limited. We never know who will be in power next and the next people in power might not be as benevolent as those we have seen thus far.
At the time where there is no clear distinction between government and corporate surveillance, self-regulation is our best bet that we have in hands. Refraining from using tech altogether might be unrealistic for most people, but there are ways to reclaim the data that sustains it, and we can limit them collecting new data. Choose products that are better for privacy, leave social media, use privacy extensions on our browsers. Do not turn on phone’s wi-fi, bluetooth and locations services when we don’t need them. Use the legal tools at our disposal to ask companies for the data they have on us, and ask them to delete that data. Change our settings to protect our privacy, refrain from connecting contacts to any application at all times. Although it is easily said than done, but never give in to the data economy without at least some resistance.
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