Thursday, 12 March 2015
Week Two
The collective horror over the invasiveness of Twitter was an interesting thing to behold this week. It does appear that Big Brother is watching us, and is using our own blithe disregard of privacy to do it. After reading up on it a bit, the issues are worse than I had realised. Cookies I knew about, and didn't much like, but I didn't realise that applications on your phones (Siri for example) can listen to your conversations, gmail can read your emails, and cars can tell insurance companies about your driving habits. It's frightening, really. Mother Jones has an interesting article about it, read it here
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It is terrifying, isn't it. We really open ourselves up online, often without fully comprehending the full extent of the 'public' nature. What worries me, as well, is how we so readily accept conditions of use for apps and the like that give access to our location, activity, content...because does it really matter? We lead such connected lives, so different from when we were children. I'm a bit of a natural over-sharer - I need to be careful with that on Twitter!
ReplyDeleteI think part of the reason people are so accepting of the invasion of our privacy is because of an overload of information. Every single application and program that one downloads or uses has a gigantic user licence agreement or similar; its bloody hard work to read all of them!
ReplyDeleteAnd as you said is it worth protecting our privacy in the end? I consider myself to be a pretty private person but I would not be able to complete this degree or get a job or keep in contact with my friends online if I wished to avoid any program that was gathering my data and keeping tabs on me.