The Commited MAY 2015 | Page 28

TED ALİAĞA COLLEGE / 9-A Online Privacy Talha Arda BOZ 26 Governments, companies, economies; literally everything in our daily life is all connected to one point: The internet. Every day, millions of people are using it all around the world and it has become one of the most indispensable tools in our world. Since the beginning of the internet era, we have been connected to it in almost every way. Every personal detail about us, from what we had for dinner the previous night to what our political ideology is possible to be accessed. And there is no way we can prevent this from happening anymore. That is one of the reasons why we should never give up on our right to online privacy. In 2016, one of the biggest social media platforms in the world was said to have manipulated election results by using personalized political ads and raising funds. The social media giant was said to be massively influential, not because it was tipping the scales with fake news, but because it helped generate the bulk of the campaign’s $250 million in online fundraising. Even more, in 2018, data-sharing deals were exposed and 2.1 billion user’s information was shared with other giant tech firms. If a single company could accomplish this much with such significant personal details; Imagine what governments could do! Today, there is a system called “Mass Surveillance”. It is the network of monitoring systems used by the government to supervise the lives of citizens. In authoritarian regimes, the internet can easily be used to blacklist people due to their political ideas. Even though an internet environment where you can express your ideas and raise your voice against anything freely is necessary, you could never trust such a system in criminal situations because your data could easily be used against you and you would be treated as a criminal while the only thing you have done is thinking differently and speaking your mind about politics or simply criticizing your governance. Considering all these facts, abandoning online privacy would be a dark scenario for humanity taking into account the pace of technological development and its prevailing dominance over our world. The internet service providers must guarantee complete protection and safety to the users by not sharing any information with neither the governments nor the private companies. We have to protect our right to privacy and be completely secure online.