Privacy in the digital age.
Privacy is a basic human right but this privacy is being tweaked in our everyday life as our lives are getting intertwined by the online world. Imagine a world 15 years back where there was no internet, where you won’t find a need to share pictures of you on some strange platform like Instagram or post your tiny opinion on Twitter. Life was much simpler back then. But, in the present, we watch hundreds of hours worth content on OTT platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, share pictures of us and scroll through some thousands of pictures of our friends and strangers on Instagram, read a tweet from the person who is millions of miles away from us and watch content created by some random person on YouTube. Seriously, we are more connected than any human was in the entire history of homo sapiens.
What made this change possible? Is it people or sophisticated mindsets? Is it corporations or laws governing them? Maybe all of them. Humans evolved into this creature who survives only for the sake of survival. The human being is selfish, we have needs to satisfy. To organize and allocate scarce resources we invented money and to earn it we need to focus on revenues. This, in my opinion, made the change possible. Humans built computer systems, the internet, and many companies sprang up like mushrooms making the internet their core framework. All these companies and products make us question only one thing — how private are our lives? Every human should question this before uploading their picture on Instagram, sending a snap on Snapchat, and hitting like on Facebook wall. Our privacy depends on the person or corporation who is handling our data.
This internet is unregulated and governments are creating new laws and passing new bills to curb misuse of data but how successful can they be? Companies provide a privacy policy to us when we register for a new service but here’s a catch, they are hard to understand and people have less time to read it. I am not here to blame any company because, in the end, everything is a business with millions of data and billions of revenue in play. My point is to make people aware of how their data is being used to generate profits for the company. Every Google search, every photo we click, every step we take is monitored by millions of tiny algorithms to create a profile on — who we are? What do we do? And sell them to potential advertisers so that they can make an informed decision and create a compelling advertisement for us to purchase that product. It is no magic, it is just data science combined with statistics and algorithms. It is a simple business where you get services for free and you provide data for companies to make a profit which is a good transaction.
There is a saying — if you’re using something for free, then you are the product.
That’s why Google and Facebook give services for free while companies like Apple, Netflix offer premium services because they are not interested in selling your data and instead make money directly from the customer.
Welcome to internet business 101, where
If you use a service for free, you provide data. If you don’t want your data to be sold then you have to pay a little fee.
But this is not entirely true for some organizations. There is another type of model where the company will neither collect data about its user nor offer its service for a premium fee instead provides everything for free. Such companies are called non-profit organizations and are open-source in nature with a large community of collaborators actively working on that project to make it available for all the users. Best examples for such non-profit organizations include Signal.org, which allows you to communicate with people freely with good privacy and security, and Standard Notes, which allows users to take private notes with encryption in place.
To conclude, the internet is great if used in a good way. Nothing is safe but there is something we can do to keep our private data safe. To be in a safe spot, just post essential information because once a file gets on the internet, it stays on the internet. Protect your data by securing your accounts and educate yourself on digital privacy.
I have published a podcast episode on the same topic, you can check it out on Google Podcasts and Spotify.
