Beating The New Tech With New Rules!
Privacy has been an issue for humans for ages. When humans settled and started to own
things, privacy has born. It continued to evolve in order to match social standarts and thoughts as
the society evolved. However, in new technology age a problem occured. It became too easy to
reach the private information of an average human. Companies started to make profit by using
this informations. Besides there is an inconsistency. Most people do not want to make a move
against these major, online information stealing crimes and some of them are not even aware of
the size of these crimes. Yet easy solutions could be formed to use this online environment with
higher safety, such as educating the society, changing constitution of privacy and revealing the
manipulative running of privacy consents.
It is clear that lack of education about online privacy has a great role in this problem. In 2014
Shklovski (as cited in Telematics and Informatics 41, 2019) said ‘Some researchers even argue
that mobile phones can be seen as an extension to the human body.’ It is clear that almost every
adult, teenager (even children) connect to the internet and use smart devices on a daily basis.
Most of them do not realize the consequences of the actions they take in the virtual online
environment and the footprints they leave on the internet. Rest in their lives these factors get
used by big companies or even by the government against them. But giving a proper education to
these young generations in school or even in the household might be a good step to reduce risks
of these problems happening. The older generations also should get more informed about this
situation. Even if they did not grow up in the internet age they play a massive part in this play.
By getting society educated properly on this matter it could be possible to change the privacy
which companies and governments have created to use in their favor. As Shariff et al. (2021)
said ‘Moralizing privacy via piggybacking may rally greater political will to support privacy
rights (p.164). Meaning with the pressure of an educated society, bringing the privacy violations
of corporations to the light may help everyone to realize the problems and take action against
these privacy violations.
Moreover the law which is supposed to protect the society against online crimes are not fully
satisfying for the users. Shariff et al. (2021) also declared ‘The easily accessed digital footprints
people leave online can often return to sabotage other aspects of their life’ (p.163). The law
accomplishes to protect the users from major problems but they fail to protect from hidden
dangers which could serve to massive corporations as profit. Shariff et al.(2021) added that
‘Many reports of privacy risks and violations -such as eavesdropping by smart speakers in
people’s homes- have emerged.’(p.163). An average user mostly does not realize the hidden
threats like this one. However by improving the law which protects online privacy, and by
making government take side with the public, it could turn into an opportunity. It can be used for
the mutual good by highlighting the crime mysteries or other crimes such as tax frauds. This
process could be done with the majority of the society pressuring the politicans. Furthermore
whenever something goes wrong in this online information market, the user who gave the
permission in order to use any app or program mostly becomes the one who gets the damage. In
order to ensure the society’s security, this must change. Companies should be held responsible
for the damage they have done or they could do in the future. If these conditions could be
maintained by the law the two-dimensional online world would be far less dangerous compared
to now.
Privacy permission text being mostly too long, too confusing or too hard to be understood by
an average user, is also a major problem. In his TedX talk, Fred Cate (2019, 5:38) gave an
example to this problem: ‘If you count PayPal’s privacy notices, it is thirty six thousand two
hundred and seventy five words. That’s by the way longer than Hamlet’. This is a critical
strategy of companies. By making the consent text this long and confusing they almost ensure
the user not reading and accepting it right away. So with the user’s content, companies get rights
to sell or trade information. Susanne Barth et al. pointed ‘When looking at even the newest
version of the Android permission system, permission requests take place rather late in the
process’ (p.55-69). This could be explained as the other tactical move which is asking for the
consent after the user downloads the app and creates an account. After all these efforts the user
mostly does not want to delete the app so they accept the terms and conditions. These two
psychological strategies pressure users to get their information stolen legally, without the user
noticing. Promoting these dangerous plays, empowering the users and ending this violations of
human nature by the developers are great ways to make internet safer.
As a conclusion it might be true to say, changing privacy habits of the society of not to care nor
know about the dangers of online world causes the corporations to use these habits as a benefit to
theirselves. However with a better education an awareness could be created againts these crimes
and by changing the law about privacy for advantage of the society in addition, by preparing the
privacy permission texts more understandable for the user, these habits and violations could be
destroyed and every individual in the society could benefit from the advantages of improving
technology without being concerned about their privacy getting violated.
İlhan Melih Özbey
22102875
950 Words
SOURCES:
-Janina C. Roppelt et al. (2019). Telematics and Informatics 41. Elsevier
Ltd.
- Azim Shariff et al. (2021). The Privacy Mismatch: Evolved Intuitions
in a Digital World. Sagepub.com.
-Cate F. (2020, January). Fred Cate: Data Privacy and Consent [Video].
YouTube. https://youtu.be/2iPDpV8ojHA