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Law in the Internet Society
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A Journey to Freedom: A Self-Reflection-- By AlexXinruiLi - 06 Oct 2019AwarenessEver 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? 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. 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.InquisitionMy 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?Some AnswersBeyond 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. 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.Looking ForwardWhat 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. 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.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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