Resisting privacy violations

Resisting privacy violations is an ongoing battle for us. To know how to resist these disturbances we need to inform ourselves on the problems that lie ahead.

Privacy is power by Carissa Véliz

Carissa Véliz talks about privacy and the importance of it being protected. It is quickly stated that we are wrong to think that we have nothing to fear. This is true, and here’s why. Fraudsters, hackers, and others can and will use your private information against you. Crimes committed using our own information is one problem to look after. It is difficult to resist against the violation of our privacy when we don’t know who is doing so. Powerful institutions make it so that we have to act very very carefully when interacting with their systems. Because there is so many economic, political, and social power that is exerted over our privacy by these influential forces, there is so much to worry about. It is impractical to simply not engage with the internet or with any phone apps because those are necessities in today’s world. We cannot go without using the internet unless we want to flunk out of school or lose our jobs.

I’m interested in the idea of people’s desires going against their own interests. That sounds very powerful, as in the entity causing this phenomenon has a lot of power over their subjects. “The power that comes about as a result of knowing personal details about someone is a very particular kind of power. Like economic power and political power, privacy power is a distinct type of power, but it also allows those who hold it the possibility of transforming it into economic, political and other kinds of power.” This is where we start to understand a core part of what motivates companies and people to sell our information. It’s something that is hard to resist because of the power that Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and other companies hold over us.

I am reminded of Kashmir Hill’s experiment where she stopped using any services or products under the “Big Five”, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. She used a Linux Laptop and a Nokia phone, and also and a special network tool preventing her from being tracked by the tech giants. We see in her experiment that the tech giants hold a lot of power over our every day means of communication. Hulu, Netflix, Apple, Spotify, and more like those are all under Microsoft, Google, and or Amazon’s Web Services. iPhone’s can take much better pictures than the Nokia phone Kashmir used. Venmo is used by a smartphone and not the Nokia phone.

The kind of power that the tech giants hold over everyday technological services is unfathomably large. It is weaved within a tangled web of digital reign.