Digital Privacy: The Unknown Tracking of Everyday Technology
This weeks topic on digital privacy has been eye opening to the ways that we are tracked as internet users. I am guilty of ignoring disclaimers and user agreements when joining, downloading, adding, and using apps and websites. I click agree without a second thought. Who has the time to read all those pages anyways, right? I never took the time to process how much we could be missing by not reading these agreements. In the NPR podcast that we listened to, they pointed out that in a study where people were tested to see if they had read the terms and conditions, 90% of people did not. What they missed by not reading these was they had basically signed over their 1st born child by agreeing to these terms. This experiment was meant to prove how many important things about our own digital privacy we could be missing when we ignore these agreements. But they also touched on the importance of how long these agreements are. They broke it down and people would need an extra 40 minutes or more just to read through each page. No one I know has an extra 40 minutes to read those things! I guess what can be said here is that between users and creators, we need to come up with a way to shorten agreements so that common, everyday users like myself and others, can read and understand all the aspects of digital privacy that they are agreeing to when using apps and websites.
During my time reading and researching digital privacy topics, I stumbled upon this article about the 5 Biggest Online Privacy Threats of 2013. This article detailed what at the time, were some of the biggest, unknown privacy threats on the interweb. One specifically, tracking cookies, caught my attention. In the article it talks about how cookies can be used to track websites, browsers, and locations of users no matter where they access the internet from. My first thought was, if this was an issue in 2013, how advanced must this technology be now, 7 years later? We know now that Facebook, Twitter, and other websites/social media outlets, track all this information from its users and we have seen that they have not always used it responsibly. What this case study search has brought to my attention is the fact that everyday people such as myself, do not pay attention to the importance of digital privacy.
I believe that we as future teachers and educators should really have knowledge about what digital privacy is, how we can protect it, and how we can teach students and youth about safety online. One other piece that shocked me was how companies use these tracking methods and algorithms to sway public opinion. Specifically creating a display of likeminded topics and articles. For example, Facebook tracks my political views and in turn makes sure to share adds that relate to my beliefs. This can be an issue when we look at how misinformation is spread and how hacking can take part in this. I think it is important for all internet users to have knowledge on digital privacy so that we can hopefully create a safer, more private, digital world.
