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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
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| | | Awareness | |
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< | Ever since a couple years ago, I’ve started to notice that I was being listened to. This frightening revelation happened during a picnic with a few friends in Central Park, where we randomly brought up KitKat? , a well-known chocolate-covered wafer brand. Despite its popularity, I have, in fact, only had KitKat? once in my entire life. The next moment, I picked up my phone and opened Instagram, there it is, an advertisement for KitKat? . I was stunned. So were my friends. We had heard that our phones and apps could be listening to us, but none of us has taken this more seriously than a mere conspiracy theory. After all, how could anyone with good conscience conduct such as act? | >
> | When David Carroll asked in his classroom about whether you have received an advertisement that made you feel like you were being listened to, almost every student raised their hand (The Great Hack). For me, this frightening revelation happened during a picnic with a few friends in Central Park, where we randomly brought up KitKat? , a well-known chocolate-covered wafer brand. Despite its popularity, I have, in fact, only had KitKat? once in my entire life. And of course, the next moment, I picked up my phone and opened Instagram, there it is, an advertisement for KitKat? . I was stunned. So were my friends. We had heard that our phones and apps could be listening to us, but none of us has taken this more seriously than a mere conspiracy theory. After all, how could anyone with good conscience conduct such as act? | | | | |
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It would be good to be critical of this supposed evidence. Had you watched The Great Hack as assigned, you would have seen this very point discussed by David Carroll in his classroom.
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> | I’ve begun to notice more. Each time creepier than the last. TV commercials from pharmaceutical companies started to call me by my name. Dog food companies even know the name of my dog. It’s fearful to learn that we were indeed bring monitored. Our words are being listened to and analyzed, each click was recorded on a log, and our locations were constantly exposed. On top of that, our information is not possessed separately by different entities. Rather, they are owned and used by a being with the same identity –the giant corporations in Silicon Valley. | | | | |
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< | I’ve begun to notice more. Each time creepier than the last. TV commercials started to call me by my name. They even know the name of my dog.
Evidence rather than assertion is necessary with respect to "TV commercials."
That feeling that someone (not necessarily a real person) is listening and analyzing every word I have said, that someone keeps a log of whatever content I have browsed, and that someone knows exactly where I live or even where I am scares me. What scares me even more is to have learned in class that all these persons could be sharing information with one another, or even could be of the same identity –the giant corporations in Silicon Valley. | | | Inquisition | |
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< | My perception of these big names of the Silicon Valley was that they were the pioneers and trailblazers who, as the TV series Silicon Valley sarcastically puts it, “make the world a better place.” Today, however, I have started to question who they really are, or who they have become. When I bought my iPhone, I was attracted by its features such as iMessage or iCloud, tools that would allow me to connect with my family and friends easier and provide me with the convenience of having all my information synced across devices. Ironically, these same functions that drew me to the phone now have turned me into a tool for other’s financial gain. Step by step, they tempt me with my own humanly laziness. I could not resist but to give in to the convenience such technology provides by voluntarily offering all my personal information to the Silicon Valley giants, without realizing the potential consequences. If today they are using us for advertisements, what could they be using us for tomorrow? | >
> | My perception of these big names of Silicon Valley was that they were the pioneers and trailblazers who, as the TV series Silicon Valley sarcastically puts it, “make the world a better place.” Today, however, my personal experience and learnings from the classroom have enabled me to question who they really are, or who they have become. Devices like an iPhone attracts a great portion of the U.S. population because of its user-friendly features such as iMessage or iCloud, tools that promised to allow us to connect with my family and friends easier and to provide us with the convenience of having all our information synced across devices. Ironically, these same functions that drew most of us to using smartphones have now turned us into mere commodities. As Professor Moglen said in class, to the majority of us, the issue has seemingly become a binary choice between giving up the “convenience” or protecting our privacy. But is this really the only choice? | | | Some Answers | |
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< | Beyond using our personal information for advertising, the tech giants also control what we see. I didn’t quite understand how this was possible initially, until Professor Moglen pointed out to us that browsers would deter users from entering his twiki site. He posed a mind-boggling question: Do we really trust the browser more than our professor these days? Contemplating for an answer, I have realized that I have long taken for granted the idea that the browsers I use knows what’s best for me. How startling it is to know that at the end of the day, they were all “advertisement companies?”
After some research, I found that the browsers have been performing such acts for a long time, screening away content using machine learning.
"Some research" should have yielded some citations.
However, such filters can easily make mistakes and be controlled by other big corporations or governments. In 2017, the CEO of Cloudfare, a company that serves as an internet gatekeeper for over nine million visitors, terminated service to a Neo-Nazi website. Without discussing whether the content of the website is worth promoting or not, Cloudfare CEO’s mere ability to conduct such act makes me fearful of the future of our internet. In his email to the employees, he confessed that it was “an arbitrary decision,” that he “woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet.” If this shows the extent of power that internet gatekeepers retain in their hands, my perception of the world, construed using the information gained online, might be completely skewed. | >
> | Beyond using our personal information for advertising, the tech giants also effectively control what we see. As we find out in class that most browsers we use today would deter users from entering his twiki site, Professor Moglen posed a mind-boggling question: Do we really trust the browsers more than our professor these days? The documentary The Great Hack discusses how our data were sold from companies like Facebook to a company called Cambridge Analytica. It claims to be an expert at analyzing people’s behavioral data. When in fact, it is a “propaganda machine” that was able to influence real persons’ votes in the 2016 election, despite most people’s strong belief and we can’t possibly be influenced this easily. (see also https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/595338116/what-did-cambridge-analytica-do-during-the-2016-election) How did the internet know more about us than we do ourselves? | | | | |
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A citation would have helped. With a little checking, you might not have misspelled "Cloudflare," and perhaps even have been able to assess more critically whether Cloudflare is actually disabling people from reading a website, or is performing an action more analogous to ending a security contract and withdrawing its guards.
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> | Tracing back to the history of the internet we use today, the founding father Tim Berners-Lee envisioned an internet for everyone. (https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/tim-berners-lee-is-on-a-mission-to-decentralize-the-web/) It was the case for a while until the big internet companies control the majority of the web servers. (https://breakermag.com/the-decentralized-web-explained-in-words-you-can-understand/) Take Google as an example: it hosts about “twenty-five percent of all North American Internet traffic.” (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-mission-to-decentralize-the-internet) The problem with this is that every time we click to consent to privacy agreements to use these internet services, we give away our personal information in the hands of a few. As they continue to accumulate the amount of personal information collected, they became the “mind of God,” one that knows everything about us and controls our actions without being noticed (Eben Moglen Lecture Dec 4, 2019). | | |
Looking Forward
What do we do next? I started out by using less and less social media. Putting away devices whenever possible. But that’s not enough. Ironically, a TV series, Silicon Valley, introduced me to the concept of a decentralized web, claiming that this would be the future of a new internet. The concept is not made up at all. In real life, there have been many engineering building their own version of the decentralized web. | |
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< | The difference between a decentralized web and the internet today is the elimination of middlemen/gatekeepers. In the internet we use today, if I want to reach something on the web, I would need to go through multiple middlemen, including domain name server, server hosting company and other third parties. Today, more and more data are moved to the cloud, hosted by giant corporations, giving them unlimited control as middlemen. This centralization process makes the internet more fragile and less free because it’s easy to abuse such power. Decentralized web envisioned a people-powered version of the internet where the centralized middlemen are removed. Imagine our internet today is the centralized Library of Moglenville. In this library, books are prone to be stolen and lost, administrators can control what books are in the library, and readers need an ID card to check out books. In a decentralized library, books copies will be made and stored in neighbors’ homes without interference of administrators, and you can lend books with anonymity. As such, controls from big corporations would be hard to enforce on a decentralized web, where there are no hosting companies, because the websites are served by the myriads of visitors themselves. I’m motivated to learn more about how to build such a decentralized web. Perhaps one day, I can build my own email and a home security system. For you, my readers, start by preventing your friends and family from buying devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo. | >
> | The difference between a decentralized web and the nowadays centralized internet is the elimination of middlemen. In the internet we use today, if I want to reach something on the web, I would need to go through domain name server, server hosting company and other third parties (Tamas Kocsis TED talk on The case for a decentralized internet). The layers of middlemen, who are controlled by the centralized big internet companies, make the internet more fragile and less free because it’s easy to abuse such power. Decentralized web envisioned a people-powered version of the internet where the centralized middlemen are removed. Imagine our internet today is the centralized Library of Moglenville. In this library, books are prone to be stolen and lost, administrators can control what books are in the library, and readers need an ID card to check out books. In a decentralized library, books copies will be made and stored in neighbors’ homes without interference of administrators, and you can lend books with anonymity. As such, controls from big corporations would be hard to enforce on decentralized web, where there are no hosting companies, because the websites are served by the myriads of visitors themselves. I’m motivated to learn more about how to build such a decentralized web. Perhaps one day, I can build my own email and a home security system. For you, my readers, start by trying to use apps and services built to support the ultimate realization of a completely decentralized web, like Professor Moglen’s FreedomBox Project, “OpenBazaar (a decentralised marketplace), Graphite Docs (a Google documents alternative), Textile Photos (an Instagram alternative), Matrix (a WhatsApp? alternative) and DTube (a YouTube? alternative).” (https://freedomboxfoundation.org/; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle) | | | | |
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Perhaps a little further research would have explained the idea that the web was originally decentralized. That the engineering you are discussing concerns the "redecentralization" of the web. You might even have encountered my FreedomBox project. | | | | |
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< | Overall, I think it is clear that the best way to improve the draft is to put more of the effort of learning into the writing. Convey less your personal emotions and more the material you have read. The research should not remain off-stage. Then in a third draft we can begin to find out how to express more clearly your own ideas raised off the research.
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