“Privacy on the Internet? That’s oxymoron.” — Catherine Butler
At the present age we are living among high-technology, internet, social media, machines, civilization and millions of humans. Since 1999 the number of internet users in Thailand has rapidly kept on increasing and increasing. Our daily life has mostly been thrown into the internet whether it is our bank account, friends, photos, schedules or even letters which are known as E-mail. Which means that we have been given our privacy, our own information to the internet just by filling in our information into a box and being delivered to somewhere we could impossibly know.
As mentioned in the ‘New Ways of Seeing’ podcast of James Bridle Ep.01, “In the centre of town you’d find the banks, the town hall, the library and the post office, and the big department stores. You could even go into them, and maybe ask questions about what they did. You could see them working, and thus understand how they worked. And with this visibility, with this weight of bricks and mortar, came the possibility of accountability, and social responsibility…” But compared to the internet we couldn’t even see how it actually works. We don’t know how many people or machines have ever seen a password to our bank account.
After I’ve listened to this podcast of James Bridle the words that caught my attention are “visible” and “invisible” which are mentioned about the internet. I agree with the idea that there is no privacy on the internet. People are resigned to give fundamental aspects of their privacy for convenience in using their phones, people are also given their fingerprint to the machines for convenience as well. People are being less concerned about their privacy recently. They would love to post or write anything they ever want on their social media platforms. Some of the new internet users like an adult or Gen-X are using Facebook for posting, updating, chit-chat on their profile feeds without concerning any of their privacy. They would never know who is stalking on their Facebook or someone could gain their information just by scrolling down through their feeds.
In 2016, there was news about the drug dealers who got arrested by the cops because he posted a picture and videos of him and his friends doing drugs on his Facebook’s feeds. Then after the police saw that post he tried to run away but got caught because he checked-in on his Facebook.
“The citizens will divide between those who prefer convenience and those who prefer privacy” — Niles Ole Finnemann
Phone number verification could give both pros and cons to society. It would be easier for us to know whose phone number is this just by checking their phone number’s information. But on the other hand, anyone could know our phone number or any of our privacy information which linked to the phone number as well. Since the moment we fill in that box our identity has already been revealed. Nothing could guarantee our privacy rights on the internet. We could know how ramen noodles process but for the process of how facebook or an internet algorithm work are invisible.
Finally, I agree with the sentence from the podcast that “there is no privacy on the internet”. People really need to become more concerned about their privacy. They should know their limitation of what should be posted or should not. They need to know the consequences before filling in any of those boxes for their own conveniences.
