I know how yesterday, I said that anonymity has created a culture of hate and aggressive ignorance based on lack of consequences. However, it turns out we don't need to worry about that at all, because the idea of internet anonymity is more and more thoroughly becoming a complete illusion. Very soon, nothing we do online will go unrecorded with our names attached to it.
This has become a recently accelerating trend. Perhaps we are just recently discovering all the behind-the-scenes tracking that is going on. There are two types of internet tracking that have recently learned about: advertising and government.
One of the most recent news stories has been over our government tracing its own citizens. This story was recently brought to light by a NSA worker named Edward Snowden. He revealed how the NSA was monitoring the US citizens in a huge number of ways, including reading and searching our personal emails for dangerous and terrorist-related words. Many people have protested this and have called for laws to be put in place to protect our privacy. In response to this public outcry the government basically kept doing the same things they were before and tried to arrest Snowden, who had to flee to Russia to avoid persecution.
There are even websites dedicated to keeping our emails private... and then let the government read them all anyway. This is because the Patriot Act, a bill signed into effect shortly after 9/11 that greatly reduced the privacy of the american citizen. I completely agree with the increase in security measures, but it gave the government the ability to wiretap, access online data, follow, and arrest without reasonable suspicion individuals who have no indicated connection to any terrorist activity. So, it might be a little bit easy to abuse that power, and I hope the people of America can eventually find the fine line between security and privacy. However, right now we are at the whim of the federal government.
The other tracking that is now going on is for advertising purposes. There is a new trend where advertisers have been paying online companies to provide data on who accesses what websites to personalize the advertising to that person. This may not seem too important until you realize this means that private business companies are tracking your online movements so that they can reap an economic benefit from it. This is become slightly more sinister when you realize exactly how in-depth it is. In a quote from the New York Times about Target's advertising strategy "Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own." That's more than most people know about their best friend! This was in a story about how a father became angry when Target sent his daughter an ad for supplies that a new mother might need, implying she was pregnant. He later apologized to Target, as it turned out she was pregnant without his knowledge. Target knew a girl was pregnant before her own father did!
I'm not saying this is the start of the computer uprising or that we are all pawns underneath the greater powers, but it is a disturbing trend. Thanks for reading
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