Are we being controlled?
The reason for me to believe we are being controlled is very straight forward and it points directly to Data mining algorithms and the “Godfathers” that control them. Why i call the heads of these social media and data anyalst firms “Godfathers” is because they know more about you, your past, what you’re doing right now and what you will do in the future better than your friends, family and even yourself. When I say they know what you would do in the future it is my optimism that they do not use the private information they have about you to sway your life and decisions in the directions that prove to be profitable for them and their conglomerates. This is why it is time to throw some “light” on this rampant issue and some “shade” on these so called Godfathers to stop them from privatizing your personal life.
It has become a huge problem in the recent years because the entire world has become digital and everyone’s life revolves around social media and other online websites and applications. People are so addicted to these applications that they post every small detail about their life on these social media platforms. Facebook is the biggest out of them and it has more than 2.4 billion monthly active users that is almost one out of every three people, which means one out of every three people post updates about their lives every single day on this platform. This is a problem because if any of this information gets hacked and leaked it is an intrusion to the users’ privacy and private information. Hackers then use this information to trap users into different scams and can also be used to steal credit card information or harm them by manipulating their accounts and threatening to expose the private details about their lives. This is why I think this is a major problem that needs to be solved.
One of the biggest controversies regarding data mining was with a company called Cambridge Analytica, it is a data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the Brexit campaign. During the election campaign it harvested Facebook profiles of over 50 million American voters, which was the tech giants biggest ever data breach, and used the information from these profiles to build a software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018, p. 1). The company made a similar program for the Brexit campaign too. This company has also received a lot of legal backlash for allegedly interfering in the Indian and Brazil elections. Cambridge Analytica used the private information of these people to target the voters with personalized political advertisements to sway the votes in the favor of Donald Trump. It also says how the tech giant had an obligation to inform its users about the data breach and how it failed to do so. Facebook also denied that the harvesting of 50 million accounts was a data breach because it said that Cambridge Analytica gained access to those accounts in a legitimate way but they did not aide by the tech giant’s rules and passed on the information to third parties.
With the increasing addiction to phones and the internet people are in search for a public Wi-Fi wherever they go. However they forget that in this world information is money and so by blindly clicking “okay” on the terms and conditions and privacy policies they are giving the Wi-Fi owners access to the private information on their phones, every website or application that a user would access with this Wi-Fi will get stored in their database. Even when people geolocate on where to eat and playing games with their friends on mobile applications to kill time, they are basically putting all their private information on the table. This is mainly because of the use of Facebook accounts as a log in for everything allows companies to get a deeper look into personal lives (White, 2019). A recent huge problem had occurred with a Chinese company called Tiktok, it was a platform on which kids could make videos of themselves with background songs, the backlash that this company received from the US government was that it uploaded these videos to a common database, the company then had to change it operating system to make vidoes private and for consensual sharing purposes only (Sachs & Sachs, 2019).
These cybercrimes related to data mining has penetrated the privacy of our homes, with the launch of the Amazon Alexa which is a personal home assistant system. Research shows that alexa which has listening and speaking capabilities listens to conversations that do not involve her “wake up” command, and all these conversations get stored in a database which can be accessed and analyzed. (Bohac & Keck, 2018, p. 1). Last year Google announced that it’s smart Artificial Intelligence would automatically complete sentences for users while they are writing it. This is possible because google gathers data about an individual from the countless applications that a person uses owned by them, these include Gmail, Android(OS), Google maps, Google drive and Google search. Google makes you accept the terms and conditions which allows them to share your information among their applications and also allows them to sell your information that specifies your preferences in food, clothing and other day to day activities (“Google sells the future, powered by your personal data”, 2019).
In this world internet has become more of a necessity because of the increasing dependence of people on it. The entire world’s population is affected by these data mining scams and the sale of their personal information, children from the ages of three start using electronic devices in most countries and so making it increasingly difficult to circumvent the risks it poses. A major population of the people online are children below the ages of eighteen and so the protection of personal information rights in the network environment is a problem that legislators cannot ignore.
