Introduction
The development of the internet has led us into the digital age and has also brought some degree of changes in society. For example, the way people communicate has changed from the old days of emails and phone calls to the present day through various social media platforms and video communication platforms. Lifestyles have changed, where grocery shopping and cooking used to be required, and now all of this can be done online. There are also changes in business models, with more and more services pursuing personal customization, a process that requires a great deal of personal information. The digital age has provided people with a wealth of information and services, and also access to the internet is becoming easier and easier, so much so that people do not even need to leave their homes to meet their basic needs and emotional expression. Especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, the public has become more reliant on the internet, online teaching and ‘Work From Home’ have become an essential part of some people’s lives, and this new method has solved major problems as in education and financial incomes. However, there is also a growing public discussion and concern about the issues that can and have arisen in the digital age, including ethical issues, security issues, privacy issues, and so on. In this blog, the main focus will be on the threats to privacy in the digital age.
Information handed over voluntarily
It is well known that today’s networks are not completely closed or secure and that anyone has access to them. Coupled with the fact that information on the web is capable of being easily copied, in digital form it can be reproduced an infinite number of times without losing its authenticity, and digitized information can be easily disseminated at a low cost. The digital age has given people the ability to collect, aggregate and analyze information unobtrusively and to store it cheaply (Council, Sciences, Board, & Age, 2007). This is what has led to a number of security risks and privacy issues. Privacy concerns mainly relate to the leakage of personal information and data, which generally occurs in major online platforms and software. No matter what type of website and software it is, it involves the need for users to provide some personal information. For example, although most social media platforms are anonymous, they do require users to sign up using their mobile phone number or email address. Besides this, online delivery or booking services require more private information, including home address and bank details. On top of that, there are hacking attacks on individual electronic devices via the internet and the embedding of computer viruses that can lead to the loss of local files and even the theft of identity information.
Information handed over without your knowledge
Another important player that must be discussed in the digital age is Big Data, which also includes various algorithms and artificial intelligence. Initially, their role was to statistically and analyze data more quickly and easily in order to provide more accurate market targeting to various platforms and thus improve the user experience. Netflix, for example, is a platform that is very good at using algorithms and artificial intelligence to make improvements. Netflix now has the ability to track when users start, stop, rewind, fast forward and pause videos. Fast-forward and pause videos, in addition to recording the time of day watched, the user’s location, the device on which the streaming took place, whether the user watched a show from start to finish, if she or he watched something next, and so on, as a way to get positive feedback to measure the reception of individual shows (Hallinan & Striphas, 2014, p. 128-129). From this, we can see that in addition to the information actively provided by the user, there is a lot of data that is recorded without the user being aware of it, such as browsing history, purchase history, location information, etc. Of even greater concern to the public is today’s biometric technology, which uses information technology to measure and record biological or physiological characteristics of the human body for identification purposes. These characteristics can include DNA sequences, gait, retinal patterns, fingerprints, and so on (Council, Sciences, Board, & Age, 2007). And emerging products with this technology are already commonplace, from the most basic mobile phone fingerprint and facial recognition to smart watches that monitor heart rate, blood oxygen, and more. With such detailed and in-depth personal information being summarized and analyzed by Big Data, coupled with the fact that the internet is no longer an isolated system, various platforms can share information with each other. While the usefulness of processing Big Data is largely unquestionable, it also comes with high privacy risks when manipulating personal data. This is mainly due to two aspects of Big Data analysis. Firstly, the larger the volume of data, the higher the probability of re-identifying individuals, even in datasets that appear to have no linked information about them. Secondly, Big Data analytics can infer new and more critical information from ‘innocuous’ personal data that was not intentionally disclosed by the affected person (Gruschka, Mavroeidis, Vishi, & Jensen, 2018).
Facebook & Cambridge Analytica
There are many platforms that have been accused of privacy breaches in recent years, and none has received more public attention than Facebook, partly because of its popularity and the very wide range of people who use it, and secondly because the company has made many data mistakes since its inception in 2004. This blog will focus on Facebook as an example of how the company treats its users’ personal data and how its technology products can pose a threat to public privacy.
I believe Facebook does not need much introduction, it is a very well-known social media platform and the volume of users on the platform is very large, which means that the amount of data Facebook holds is also very large, and as mentioned before, the larger the amount of data, the higher the probability of identifying an individual. The consequences of a platform with such a large database being involved in a personal data breach are serious.
Since its inception, Facebook has faced no less than ten privacy disputes, the most notable of which was the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. Cambridge Analytica was a political data analysis company that sold psychological profiles of American voters to political campaigns, gaining access to the private Facebook data of over 87 million users. It is worth noting that there is evidence that Facebook was aware of what Cambridge Analytica was doing as early as 2015, with documents indicating that in September 2015, Facebook was aware that Cambridge Analytica’s data scraping practices may have violated its policies. On top of that, in April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the Senate that the company learned in 2015 that “Cambridge Analytica had purchased data shared by people from one of Facebook’s app developers” and asked the company to delete and stop using Facebook’s data (Feiner, 2019). Yet until the whole affair was reported in 2018 by revelations, Facebook was not able to effectively go about stopping Cambridge Analytica’s actions.
This incident is a good example of how the public has lost control of their personal information and data. Although Facebook displayed its privacy agreement to users before asking for their personal information, claiming that they would not misuse their data and would not disclose it to third parties, this did not prove to be the case. When users agree to these terms, they are legally bound and unable to effectively protect their privacy. As Suzor says, the legal reality is that social media platforms belong to the companies that created them and they have almost absolute power over how they are run. Each major platform has a service agreement with a clause that sets out the ground rules, and your use of the platform indicates your acceptance of any rules that the platform may set (Suzor, 2019, p. 11).
Large digital platform companies such as Facebook have an increasing amount of say and decision-making power, and their control over large amounts of personal data and the algorithmic processes used to manage it are opaque (Flew, 2021). This leads to a situation where the public’s right to privacy is not guaranteed and data breaches continue to occur, and privacy breaches can very easily evolve into security risks. The data leaked includes the user’s home address and daily movement routes, which could be used by someone with bad intentions to compromise the user’s personal safety.
Facebook Glasses
In addition to the data leaks that have occurred as a result of inadequate protection of user data by the platforms themselves, there are more and more new products that are being introduced as technology develops. Just recently Facebook launched a new product: Facebook Glasses, which has once again raised the public debate on privacy. The selling point of these smart glasses is the ability to take photos and videos anywhere, anytime. This is a feature that many people find offensive, as their privacy and image rights can be more easily violated. Facebook seems to have anticipated the reaction of the public and has come up with a solution: an LED light will be illuminated on the glasses when the camera is on to inform people around the wearer (Meta, 2021). However, it would be very easy for a small LED to be deliberately covered by the user, and secondly, the glasses themselves look no different from normal glasses and are easy to ignore. If the glasses were to be used by a user with a bad motive, such as wearing them in a public fitting room or public bathroom, it would be a more serious violation of public privacy. As mentioned above, the development of information technology has made it easier to collect information in the digital age, and devices for data collection are becoming more and more common, with devices such as Facebook glasses, which are cheaper and more convenient than ordinary filming devices, making it cheaper to collect information. They are not stand-alone but are deployed in networks, turning the wearer into a walking surveillance device, and even if the data collected is not intended to monitor the behavior of others, it can often be repurposed for that purpose.
Conclusion
There are two sides to everything, and while the advantages of the digital age are clear, the public needs to be aware of the risks and threats that come with it. Digital platforms and new technologies of all kinds offer services to people in exchange for their information and data. The active use and acceptance of services by users implicitly gives them the right to collect and analyze data. At the same time, privacy clauses to which users have personally consented deprive them of a certain degree of protection at the legal level.
References
Council, N. R., Sciences, D. on E. and P., Board, C. S. and T., Age, C. on P. in the I., Millett, L. I., Lin, H. S., & Waldo, J. (2007). Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age. Washington, D.C: National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11896
Feiner, L. (2019, August 23). Facebook learned about Cambridge Analytica as early as September 2015, new documents show. CNBC. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/23/facebook-releases-new-cambridge-analytica-documents.html
Flew, T. (2021). Regulating platforms. Cambridge, UK ;: Polity Press.
Gruschka, N., Mavroeidis, V., Vishi, K., & Jensen, M. (2018). Privacy Issues and Data Protection in Big Data: A Case Study Analysis under GDPR. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), 5027–5033. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2018.8622621
Hallinan, B., & Striphas, T. (2016). Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture. New Media & Society, 18(1), 117–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814538646
Meta. (2021). Ray-Ban stories [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w328hm5KUkc&t=218s
Suzor, N. P. (2019). Lawless: The Secret Rules That Govern Our Digital Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108666428