Tracking Is An Assault On Liberty

Jim Harper, the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch, feels, “People should get smart and learn how to control personal information.” However, at this time, the only way to thoroughly control your personal information is to avoid the internet altogether. Once a web purchase is completed or a post is liked, that data moves beyond the reach of that individual. An identity is created, but the one it identifies has no authority in the matter. The data brokers have carte blanche to handle or pass along information as they please. Truth and privacy become casualties when the only concern is how to make a profit, and there's always a profit to be made. As Alexis Madrigal noted, “Every move you make on the internet is worth some tiny amount to someone.” Individuals should have control over their internet identity after their hands leave the keyboard. The damage done, whether purposeful or unintended, is too great of a risk to let continue. In the meantime, Jim Harper's limited solution should not be ignored. Each individual must be attentive to what data they make available. For now, it is the only power we

Privacy is something that most people believe is not possible on the internet, but with the correct knowledge it can be possible. In Nicholas Carr’s essay “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty”, he states that “It is very easy to find information about people on the internet, even private things that people don’t expect others to be able to see” (538). People don’t realize that what they do online can affect their personal lives such as their credit score, the ads that are recommended to them, and even the cookies in their computer. While Carr may have great points, he may not have considered the ways people do have privacy. There are some ways to protect browsing, people just need to know how. Most browsers have a mode that allows people to visit sites without being tracked. There’s no history, and no cookies.

This course has been about making good arguments and evaluating their effectiveness. The debate on the government’s role in regulating the internet is filled with many different opinions and viewpoints. I will need the knowledge I have gained in this course to sort through these claims, and create my own arguments. The title of Chapter 27 in “Everything’s an Argument” is “How Has the Internet Changed the Meaning of Privacy?” The chapter discusses many parts of the internet and privacy, including government surveillance. My topic goes further than just government surveillance: should the government actually regulate information from the internet? The internet has become an integral part of our society, and many of us will use it

Privacy is what allows people to feel secure in their surroundings. With privacy, one is allowed to withhold or distribute the information they want by choice, but the ability to have that choice is being violated in today’s society. Benjamin Franklin once said, “He who sacrifices freedom or liberty will eventually have neither.” And that’s the unfortunate truth that is and has occurred in recent years. Privacy, especially in such a fast paced moving world, is extremely vital yet is extremely violated, as recently discovered the NSA has been spying on U.S. citizens for quite a while now; based on the Fourth Amendment, the risk of leaked and distorted individual information, as well as vulnerability to lack of anonymity.

With the rise of the internet, some people argue that privacy no longer exists. From the 2013 revelations of government surveillance of citizens’ communications to companies that monitor their employees’ internet usage, this argument seems to be increasingly true. Yet, Harvard Law professor Charles Fried states that privacy, “is necessarily related to ends and relations of the most fundamental sort: respect, love, friendship and trust” (Fried 477). However, Fried is not arguing that in a world where privacy, in its most simple terms, is becoming scarce that these foundations of human interactions are also disappearing. Instead, Fried expands on the traditional definition of privacy while contesting that privacy, although typically viewed

“Policymakers, on both the national and organizational levels, recognize the importance of regulating privacy in online environments and its potential repercussions for online behavior”(Dmitry 149). Control over public information that is provided to us via the internet would be in violation of the fundamental constitutional foundations of American democracy, freedom of speech, which to many internet users would be considered as the beginning of a totalitarian government motivated by financial interests. “In the cognate-based approach, the notion of control over, and limited access to, one’s personal information emerges as the dominant method of conceptualizing privacy”(Dmitry 151). While the concepts of regulating internet privacy may be perpetuated by mainstream media sources and by lobbyists, the general consensus online would agree that self-regulation is more appropriate than government regulation. Much of the self-regulation has come from government-sponsored ideas that would protect users by education rather than by control.

At this instant, if one remains connected to the internet via smartphone, laptop, smart watch, or any other connected device, that being acts as a source of information for companies to use. People wonder how much spying the government and companies truly conduct in, and along came Edward Snowden in two-thousand-thirteen to expose how much is really tracked. Notably, Tom Geller, author of “In Privacy Law, It’s the U.S. vs. the World”, states, “His 2013 exposé of spying practices revealed the U.S. was secretly collecting protected European data, often via U.S. companies like Facebook” (Gellar 21). The whistleblowing act done by Edward Snowden has internet privacy becoming more of a political issue which is beneficial to the individuals who browse

In Glenn Greenwald’s TED talk “Why privacy matters”, he argues that the issue of privacy effects more than just individuals hiding a wrong. He argues the importance of privacy and how government has turned the internet into “an unprecedented zone of mass, indiscriminate surveillance. The main point that Greenwald uses, is that only bad people have a reason to protect their privacy. In this world they are two types of people, good people and bad people. Good people are those people who uses the internet for good purposes such as work and for family, and bad people are those who uses the internet for the wrong reasons such as planning violent crimes. With that, we are able to differentiate the difference between people and their privacy.

" Imagine a child on the web and a new tab browser pops up. It asks that child to give away personal information like the child’s address, the child’s parents place of employment, how long the child’s parents work and other personal information. The child answers these questions truthfully and a few days later the child’s house has been robbed. This criminal act has happened to several Americans across the country. To help keep families safe and their belongings and identities secure, the government could start monitoring the internet to help out. Although there are those who would argue that the government at federal, state, and local levels should not have an overbearing watchful eye on its citizens’ internet usage, there are several points to be made as to why our government needs to monitor its citizens.

The concern about privacy on the Internet is increasingly becoming an issue of international dispute. ?Citizens are becoming concerned that the most intimate details of their daily lives are being monitored, searched and recorded.? (www.britannica.com) 81% of Net users are concerned about threats to their privacy while online. The greatest threat to privacy comes from the construction of e-commerce alone, and not from state agents. E-commerce is structured on the copy and trade of intimate personal information and therefore, a threat to privacy on the Internet.

Our public, both worldwide and national, depends intensely on computers in innumerable aspects of its everyday operation. This improvement in technology makes it easy for the cooperations to collect people’s personal data through their online activities. People pay more and more attention to Internet privacy, They do not want their data to be unauthorized accessed by anyone at anytime. The United State government issued the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to solve this online privacy problem. In United State, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act develop quickly, but still, require further revises.

Privacy is something we all value, especially as Americans. This has been the case for quite some time, however not just Americans but the entire world is finding itself deep in a bog of fading privacy due to new technologies. The world has become hyper-connected, and with this has come private information becoming very available- often without a person’s knowledge or direct consent. The hyper connectivity has a lot of upside, but loss of privacy is not worth the wonderful technology of today. If you look over all of history, one of the things that would appear quite clearly is that knowledge is power. And today more than ever knowledge about people can be found online. This poses great risks to the masses of internet users as not just

According to Eric Schmidt, Google Chief Executive of Operations, he quoted that “Internet Privacy is an Illusion” which attracts many opinions contradicting of Schmidt‟s. Some say that Schmidt‟s logic is flawed and he has incorrectly presumed that privacy‟s only function is obscure to law-breaking. Others agree with Schmidt, with a classic quote of “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide” which is again, draws many computer professionals outrage. Toby Stevens, Enterprise Privacy group, states that the said quote is built upon false assumption and these assumptions are never questioned whenever it is brought up as an argument to determine whether it is acceptable.

Unfortunately, many people even without their knowledge are violating many ethical principles such as trust, respect and security every day. Mostly a smartphone user has at least one social media app or a chat app installed. Chat apps are used to share very sensitive and private data, such as a conversation between a husband and wife, bank and transaction details, residence address, calendar schedule, etc. and social apps to share mostly photos, videos and concerns on various topics. For an example, you may share a group photo on Facebook where others in that photo also visible to many people according to your privacy settings. Nevertheless, do you always ask permission from each friend in a group photo before you share it? If I conduct a survey on this, most probably it would end with the answer of “no” which means this act clearly violates UDHR article 12 and ECHR article 8. Smartphone users widely use chat apps to text messages and send personal photos and most of these apps store these data on their servers. So where is the privacy of using these kind of apps? Do not people know this? Even they knew about the lack of privacy and security in here, still most people use these apps because of its convenient and ease of use. Government authorities are one party who may have access to these private data in a country, with or without users’ knowledge. NSA spying scandal, which was leaked by a former contractor for the CIA, Edward Snowden on

Edward Snowden once said, “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say” (Snowden). Even in America, “land of the free” (Key 8), our ability to hide our identities is threatened daily. The right to be anonymous on the internet must be protected.