Online Privacy: Does it Really Matter?

Recently, BBC Radio 4 programme, Privacy Under Pressure, brought to light many of the difficulties that people have today in ensuring any kind of privacy online. We may not realise it but, as recent research has revealed, the 'data' that we reveal about ourselves online is not limited to the data that we knowingly provide for companies. Technology is advancing at an alarming rate, and, as the research reveals, simply 'liking' on Facebook provides sufficient information to predict such sensitive data as 'use of addictive substances' and 'parental separation'.

 Credit: http://www.maaxtalcareer.com/privacy_policy.php

Why is this such a problem?  

 

Well, to put it simply, we do not know. There are measurable and predicted harmful effects that result from a lack of privacy, including those mentioned in the programme by Natalie Nahar, but no one really knows yet what detrimental effects this kind of surveillance might have on people, and even on society as a whole, in the future. Nahar, as a web psychologist, highlights the mental stress of being constantly under surveillance. According to Nahar, such constant surveillance could be damaging to people's personalities. The situation is our modern day Panopticon: people, self censoring, sure of their lack of privacy.

Are you careful about the information you give to companies?

Well, you're likely not as careful as you think. Anonymous data is by no means as anonymous as we would like and, in the first episode of this series, it is shown that cookies can (and do) track not only your clicks on a particular website, but the movements of the cursor on the page. This, in a similar way to the eye sensor on GoogleGlass (which, according to the programme, Google are holding back from using), can follow what one is looking at at every moment on every website.

To put this in perspective; have you ever glanced at something (or hovered your mouse over a thing) that you would not want to admit to being interested in? This is the online equivalent of that single glance being recorded, uploaded to a commercial (or otherwise) website and used to analyse your preferences and personal attributes. This is not a far-fetched notion, nor a prediction of 'what-might-be'; it is happening, most likely on your computer or mobile device, right now.

So are we protected by law? 

Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is quite clear on the subject of privacy:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks

The crucial definition, here, is of course 'arbitrary'. How is it defined? One might assume that, by accepting the contractual conditions of companies' privacy policies, that one is protected from abuses that can lead to personal information being stored, redistributed, claimed as property and reused for the profit of a company without your knowledge. 

However, the idea of informed consent in these cases is rendered difficult to assume by the sheer volume of these contracts. It would take, according to Privacy Under Pressure, two-hundred hours per year for the average person to read all of the privacy policies associated with the programs and services that they use. That is five whole weeks.

Can you truly say that you have read all of the privacy policies of all of the websites and services that you are registered with? The answer is, almost definitely, no.

Take this extract, for example, from Google's Terms of Service:

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

Google, as one of the most prolific gatherers of information, asserts its right to do anything it likes with submitted content, while generously allowing users to "retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that [they] hold in that content". There are no exclusions in this statement; it will, in effect, cover everything from Google Drive to email attachments in GMail.

Writers beware!

There are other issues too...

Surveillance devices, both on the internet and otherwise, are becoming ubiquitous in our society. It may be that you have led a blameless life, but it is not solely criminal acts that can be revealed by these systems. Many adults, for example, watch pornography; would you like your viewing history to be subject to such analysis? Would you also like the company which advertises to you to know personal information about you, like your sexuality or family background?

Today, on the morning news, it was announced that all Internet Service Providers will now, by default, block access to 'adult' sites, to protect children from pornography. This means that, not only are people's browsing histories (sometimes anonymously) tracked, but people wishing to view adult content on the Internet will have to identify themselves, their ages and that interest, to the company that provides their Internet connection. This article provides some excellent information on the myriad issues with this idea.

So, what can you do about it? 

 

There are many methods that you can use in order to protect you privacy online.

1. If you wish to pay for a Virtual Private Network, such as Secure Tunnel, that will stop people connecting your IP address (that which personally identifies the location that a website is accessed from) to your online activities. 
2. Download the Tor browser bundle. This will allow you to access websites without revealing your own IP address. 

If these seem a bit expensive, or restrictive, then users of Mozilla Firefox can install add-ons that will prevent your activity being tracked by websites (in most situations):

• Get NoScript on Firefox: this prevents websites using scripts (such as JavaScript or Flash) to make your browser reveal information about you or download and / or activate harmful features. This will also reduce the risk of your device getting viruses. 
• Download Abine's DoNotTrackMe and MaskMe on Firefox: DoNotTrackMe will prevent companies from tracking your activities on websites you visit. MaskMe sets up an email relay, to allow you to avoid submitting your real email address to websites in return for services.

Both of these products are incredibly easy to install and use on Firefox. Since installing DoNotTrackMe, I have been shocked by how many companies are tracking me on websites I visit. Google Analytics and DoubleClick are two of the most ubiquitous.

Otherwise, talk about it. Link this article, write an article, email your friends, tweet your concerns, follow Abine and NoScript on Twitter.

When enough people do this, then it will send a strong message to these companies that their privacy practices are not acceptable. 

Credit: http://www.thechurchofnopeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/google-privacy-infographic-cropped.jpg

Thank you for reading! 

It has been a long time in coming...

... but I am finally ready to come back to my writing.

Recently, I graduated from university with first class honours in English Literature. I probably don't need to elaborate on how much work I did, in the latter part of this academic year, in order to bring that about. Thankfully, that is over now and I am looking forward to writing a new article soon.

Now, I just need to decide on a topic.

*ponder*

In the meantime...

Since I am working on my dissertation, and not really able to spare the time or thought for a real blog entry at the moment, here's a few little things that I find amusing (and that are vaguely related to my usual theme):

A Bit of Fry and Laurie: 'Sex Talk In Class'

I love this clip; I believe it was the first sketch on the first episode of A Bit of Fry and Laurie .

A Bit of Fry and Laurie: 'The Department' (Part 1)

This one struck me, upon first watching, as an unusually complex comedy sketch. The strands all come together, at the end, in a triumph of the bizarre.
Probably, the most relevant part of this to my dissertation study at the moment is the parodic sultriness of the 'wife': the performative nature of gender at its most blunt.

Cracked.com's take on 'Why Romantic Comedies are Secretly Bad for You'

Why Romantic Comedies Are Secretly Bad for You -- powered by Cracked.com

True to form for Cracked.com, their humorous sketches of modern culture are disconcertingly insightful.

Hope you like them!

Blogging on hold for the moment.

I am putting the blog on hold for a little while, in order to concentrate on my final-year project and other assignments coming up before graduation.

Luck-wishing would be most appreciated, and offers of guest posts on any well-reasoned and controversial topic would also be very welcome!

Hopefully, I will be back writing soon. Consider this to be, in part, the fulfilment of my intent to provide readers with a glimpse of what it is like to study English Literature at university.

In the meantime, here's a picture of a lizard squaring up for a rap-battle:

My dancing issss so better than yours!

Have fun!

Psychopathy and Sociopathy: a broader look at the darkness.

During my recent study for the independent project component of my final-year degree, I've been coming across a topic that has been of interest to me, on and off, for quite a few years: psychopathy and sociopathy. Now, I know that 'sociopathy' is no longer a medically-described term and that there are always ongoing debates about the meanings of these terms and their causes. However, without wading too far into the mire of semantics, I'd like to share a few things that have got me thinking, yet again, upon the subject of these mental states.

They're found in literature...

These traits turn up, not only in online blogs and magazines, but also, surprisingly regularly, in fiction. One of my influences for my project happens to be a book, by Jacqueline Carey, containing a woman who can only be described as either psychopathic or sociopathic (based on later plot evidence, I'd suggest the latter). She, beautiful and admired, stakes her whole country in a bargain that would gain her a queenship. She is described, unfailingly, as both beautiful and merciless, and with a talent for manipulating those she would have do her will. Another example would be Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. In this novel, a man with a chameleon-like tendency to show different personalities in different situations, who, even when his life depends on it, fails to truly understand the affection of a human being for another (where it is not based on their usefulness), is killed, effectively, because of this limitation.

...and also on the Internet. 

The descriptions of psychopathy and sociopathy vary wildly from source to source, and the Internet is filled with stories of people who have been conned or otherwise hurt by people who are attributed with 'sociopathic tendencies'. The general idea is that psychopaths and sociopaths lack empathy, conscience (to a certain extent) and are often ruthless and selfish.

This, however, seems to skirt around any sort of understanding of the mindset that accompanies these traits. The reason being, as aptly described in this article, that although 'people are fascinated by a mental framework that doesn't fit within their own heads, they are unable to create a [mental] model of their own which allows them to understand the psychopath'. So, in unpacking these commonly accepted 'truths', we can come to a better understanding of these mental states.

So why don't we understand them?

One of the main issues that I find people have in conceptualising these states of mind is based upon emotion. A significant proportion of the population (I apologise for the US-only stats) is predisposed towards making decisions based upon feelings - and those that don't still take them into account in their everyday lives. Feelings, leading to empathy and sympathy, are our inner moral compass. We use them to work out what is right and wrong, what we should do, how we should act. It is intrinsic to the natures of a wide section of the population.

The thought, to many people, of operating without this moral compass is understandably difficult to conceptualise. Thus, the invariable assumption (supported in part by the media) is that these people must do bad things by nature. The difficulty with this is that, since the media is generally fuelled by the reporting of negative events, and since psychopaths and sociopaths are (unsurprisingly) unwilling to identify themselves as such, our perceptions of them are invariably linked to criminality. Even this enlightened article falls into the interminable trap; the only psychopaths or sociopaths we become aware of as a society are those who have committed crimes.

Is there logic to criminality?

So, one of the most common accusations levelled at these personality types is that they are selfish, that 'they'll do anything to get ahead'. On the surface, we can see this as simply a bad characteristic - especially when it is contrasted to the empathetic, caring, giving personality that many of us would like to see more of. However, 'doing anything to get ahead' is actually a very good way of ensuring that one does not become a criminal (except where criminality is part of one's goal).

The ethical issues aside, where one is charismatic, charming and highly capable (as many of these personality types are), why would there be a need to turn to criminal behaviour? In the logical long-view, prison is not a desirable goal; business is. There is much less risk in engaging in legitimate business than there is in criminality. As this very interesting study reveals, there is a greater proportion of people who fall into the 'psychopathic spectrum' in Britain than many people might suspect. Far from being a cause for fear, Kevin Dutton's article reveals, many of the professionals we rely on in society actually present traits that are significantly psychopathic. This doesn't mean that we are surrounded by cold-blooded killers, as media bias would have one believe. Actually, it means that your barrister, politician, or doctor's psychopathic traits are what have made him or her successful and skilled enough to work on your behalf, for their own gain. 

So what should we do about it?

As this article intelligently points out, society's automatic 'judicial perspective' prevents a thorough examination of these people, from an objective standpoint. This is because society presupposes 'blame', making psychopaths and sociopaths 'bad people' as opposed to simply 'different'. It is often more productive, as the article states, to take a, counter-intuitive, analytical approach.

Take the examples above: Conrad's novel showed a sociopath of sorts, generally benign, whose main difficulty was being pushed into a tight corner. Conversely, Carey's character is forced into a state of penitence after her child is kidnapped. The main point here is that, in fiction and elsewhere, just as it is with 'normal' people, a psychopath or sociopath's actions are largely governed by circumstance. It is simply that a sociopath or psychopath will make their decisions using a process that we cannot effectively conceptualise. It is not true that all of the people who conform to these types are actively exploitative or criminal; just as it is not true that all 'normal' people are benevolent and generous. As with average people, there are those who act responsibly, and those that don't.

The mistake would be, as with any section of society, to assume that they are all the same.

Ambition and its Plural

I've recently been away from blogging due to a rather high density of exams and assignments. However, now that I am back in full, I thought it would be a good time to write a little something about ambition. 

As a third-year student at University, I will shortly be entering the job market as a new-minted graduate. This is the time of year when the moderately savvy of us begin to think about where we want to work after leaving education, or, in more conventional parlance 'what we want to do'. There's a plethora of information on the subject, online and otherwise, covering every area from how to find your perfect job to how to act once you've got it. One thing is for sure, as a contemporary author has said, that one thing we must all have, those of us who wish to succeed, is a plan. 

As a literature student, I find taking such ideas as 'plans' and 'success' at face value to be somewhat redundant. The real value lies in unpacking these ideas in order to find out what they really mean. The model of 'success' that we follow is commonly accepted, still, to be an abstract conglomerate of 'job, partner, children, house and LOTS of money'. It's in the national consciousness. Put simply, success is providing for one's young and ensuring they have a good start in life. This is all very well; I can't fault the ambition itself. However, doesn't this whole career, this job, this 'thing one does' seem conspicuously absent? We might ask ourselves, why, in an environment where one spends around five days in every seven at work, often until the age of sixty or older, our basic measure of success is nothing to do with the actual work we do, but with what it gets us? In an environment that, in many situations, defines us within society (as in the dinner party cliché 'what do you do?') our main goal is to get as much money as we can. It's no wonder people talk so much about their work-life balance, when they work their whole lives to have a life which they then have very little time left to live. The concept of 'success' is the result of an amorphous, unstructured, multi-dimensional set of circumstances that can probably never be fully traced back to their origins; however, looked at objectively, as an end in itself, it simply doesn't make sense. 

Thus, having a plan on how to achieve success is roughly akin to planning to make a cake and expecting to end up with a birthday party. 

  "It's great! But I feel like something is missing..."     

 credit bbc.co.uk

There are people I know who, in their early wisdom, decided that they would be successful in the conventional sense of the term. They work very hard to accumulate a lot of money, seemingly denying themselves those things that would, at the cost of some of that hard-won cash, add a considerable amount to their life satisfaction. This insightful article presents a plausible explanation for this glut of accumulation; that no matter what one has, our gathering instinct tells us that we must have more. This becomes a problem when much of the reward we feel for the work that we do is directly related to the accumulation of wealth that it allows us. As I argued in this earlier article of mine, 'when a person gains satisfaction of another kind from their work [...] they less readily pursue financial rewards'. Thus, perhaps one's ambition at this crucial time should be not to 'be successful', but to be satisfied. Perhaps we should even aim to be happy! 

I feel very lucky that, in studying my degree, I have discovered what it is that really gives me a sense of satisfaction. After nearly three years of studying literature, I finally know what it is like to feel truly 'full'. That hunger for a thing that fulfils me is gone; I am content. I know that, so long as I find work that allows me to fully use the skills I have gained in the course of my education, I will be satisfied. So what if I don't earn £100k, own a Lexus, buy a house at thirty, have two million in savings to give to my kids? As has been obvious thoughout history (to those that pay attention) not everyone can be rich. This isn't because 'everyone isn't rich', it isn't because 'some people have all the luck' and it isn't because 'not everyone has the ability' or even because 'the rich exploit the poor'; the reason is simply that rich and poor are relative terms. They define themselves by their opposition to another concept. There is no 'poor' without the 'rich' - and vice versa. To be happy to step away from this opposition, to define for oneself what success (at a particular endeavour) is, is surely to find what one really wants. 

I can't change the world. Studying literature is like studying the history of a culture through words; my only disappointment is that my conception of the world as a whole is limited by my knowledge of language. History is endless repetition, there is very little in this world that is truly original, and very little happens that has not happened similarly in some form at some point in history. This is not a cause for dismay or depression - the world is a fascinating, complex, beautiful place - but there will always be poverty, success, crime, injustice. This is not because humanity is callous or cruel, but because, like with rich and poor, those things are relative. They are concepts. 

In this time of job worries, it is easy, as a graduate, to lose heart about one's prospects. We shouldn't, however, fall into the trap of wishing for the world to be different. It isn't. There is only one thing that we can be sure of improving if we put our minds to it: ourselves. 

Be an optimist, be brilliant, and be happy. 

Happy New Year!

 credit to HD Wallpapers

Introducing a Collaborator...

I'd like to welcome my good friend Daniel to this blog, as a casual contributor. It is my hope that he will continue to write good pieces just like this, 'Where Did All the Passion Go?' while I am studying hard for assignments.