Privacy and the Internet

Privacy Matters: Introduction to Sociology. As Glenn Greenwald points out, the Internet has been turned into a tool of mass surveillance, notably with the NSA always lurking and spying on the Digital Era’s best means of communication.

To some extent this type of spying and violation of privacy has become accepted as the norm because sociopolitical discourse in the modern era presupposes that there are two types of people in the world, as Greenwald puts it—those who are good (who do not plot against the state) and those who are bad (terrorists who do plot against the state).

Those who are good have nothing to hide and therefore should not mind if the state snoops around and peeks into one’s personal messages and private life to make sure you are still one of the good guys. The problem with this is that it is a violation of trust and privacy and individual freedom. Still, people say that privacy only matters to people who are up to no good.

Greenwald states that Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) said in an interview that if you’re doing something that you don’t want other people to know about, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But this is a wrong way of thinking.

Many people do things that are not wrong but that might be considered taboo by society and thus if someone is spying or looking for a way to control that person, they can use information that they collect from violating the person’s privacy and use this as leverage to control the person. Those who say privacy does not matter also do not mean it, if one is to judge by their actions: they put locks on their homes, they put blinds on their windows.

Schmidt himself was upset when a magazine published private information about him that was obtained wholly by using Google products—which just goes to show the hypocrisy in Schmidt’s position. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook made a statement similar to Schmidt’s when he announced that privacy was no longer a social norm—yet when he purchased a home in Hawaii, he built an enormous wall all the way around his property to keep prying eyes from looking in (Greenwald, 2014).

What this shows is that those who say privacy don’t matter are just trying to prevent everyone from getting upset that companies like Google and Facebook are mining their personal data and selling it to advertisers, or that the NSA and federal government are collecting everyone’s personal information. Privacy does matter because it is a basic right and protection that people have always respected to help ensure their reputations are safe and that their private and public lives are kept separate.

Zuckerberg and Schmidt would almost seem to like those who want to protect their privacy to Luddites during the Industrial Revolution, who rejected technological advancements (Schaefer, slide 21). I hold strong views regarding the privacy of my electronic communications: I do not think the NSA should be allowed to monitor my communications or spy on what I am doing online. I do not like that Google and Facebook data harvest my every action, like and dislike on the Web.

I do not like that they use this data to help advertisers target me specifically. I like to use browsers like Epic that block this kind of activity,.