Hello,
I was wondering if someone could give my oral a glance and perhaps suggest some improvements.
I will be forever grateful
I want you to imagine a book about your life. A book so detailed, so comprehensive that it contained every personal email you have ever sent, every message you have ever typed out and every location you have ever visited.
A book so revealing that, if outed, could obliterate your reputation, could be used to manipulate your thoughts and actions and in extreme cases even be used by another to steal who you are.
How far would you go to protect this book?
You can stop imagining now. This book is real and you cannot simply hide it. This book, known as your digital footprint, is out there in the World Wide Web, being shared around, sold, maliciously exploited.
While it may seem like an impossible situation, it is not. All of us need to take a proactive approach in protecting our data. However, above that, it is vital for the Australian Government to enact stringent laws regarding privacy right away for our safety, and our freedom.
A very common sentiment that arises on the topic of privacy, especially following the recent Facebook leaks, is the one that goes something like ‘if I haven’t done anything wrong, I have nothing to hide.’ The fact is, privacy isn’t something to be hidden from others, it is something to protect.
Your information, your actions and your thoughts are what you believe in and who you are. It’s like arguing that there is no need for freedom of speech if you simply don’t have anything to say.
The harsh reality is that it is no longer a matter of whether you are a bad person or a good person. There is ample opportunity for your personal details to be used in plethora of malicious ways already. Identity theft, targeted advertisement, thought manipulation to name a few. Privacy is firstly a matter of our protection.
One may be forgiven to have thought that those who collect our data are the ones who provide us service such as Woolworths, Facebook and Google. There are, in fact, a vast number of specialised firms known collectively as ‘Big Data’ in the shadows such as Acxiom, Datalogic and Experian.
Acxiom, for example, holds over a billion profiles worldwide and on a staggering 75% of Australian adults as quoted by its Managing Director Ken Breen himself. It collects information on every individual in about 170 different fields according to Breen. This is a company solely focused on making inferences about your every move, every choice and every decision.
Yet what is perhaps even more confronting, is the fact that this is simply the beginning of a dystopian future that George Orwell himself could not have fathomed
In June this year a paper called ‘AI and Privacy’ was issued by Victoria’s privacy watch dog known as the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner. This paper disturbingly outlines that Artificial Intelligence is beginning to ‘blur the distinction between what is and what is not personal information’ through using this intelligence to ‘learn’ people.
Furthermore, it highlights that AI ‘fundamentally challenges’ multiple laws which underpin the privacy framework within Australia and that it is necessary for the government to ‘re-imagine traditional concepts’ relating to privacy.
What still needs to be considered, however, is the fact that these companies who use all forms of deception, deceit and duping, still do not breach any privacy laws. While this itself is a testament to the need for more rigorous laws, it also raises the question – What could those who obtain my data illegally do with it?
Unlike the comparatively timid approach of Cambridge Analytica, criminals can utilise data to steal assets, blackmail and destroy livelihoods. According to the latest Home Affairs study into Identity theft in 2016, of the over 1.5 million reported identity frauds, 77.6% were a direct result of data stolen on the internet.
As more and more companies such as Acxiom and Cambridge Analytica legally thrive, these statistics will only keep increasing. It is already too late for the millions already affected by such frauds. It is simply too late to reverse the damage on their livelihood and personal life. In a Four Corners report last year, Nik Cubrilovic, a former hacker turned security consultant, warned that there will be ‘implications’ in as little as 5 to 10 years and that following that there will be no ‘take-back on private data’.
Above the safety aspect, this is an issue about rights. Privacy is about having a right to yourself. To be able to show the world who you are, exactly how you want to. It’s the ability to make mistakes and be ourselves.
There is a human necessity and indeed crave for privacy. It is a well-known phenomenon in science that we change when being observed, we become conformist. Compliant. Controllable.
We make decisions not based on our own agency, but the mandates of societal expectations.
18th century Philosopher Jeremy Bentham utilised this very trait to design prisons to counter the ever growing number of inmates during the industrial age. The design involved the construction of a central tower from which an observer could at any moment observe any inmate in any part of the prison. The genius of this design lied in the fact that inmates could never discern if they were ever being watched and therefore had to assume they were always being watched
Where whips, brutality and tyranny failed, the omnipresent tower succeeded as the ultimate enforcer of compliance.
Doctor Dreyfus, an information systems expert at the University of Melbourne, made clear in the same report as Cubrilovic that this ability of companies to collect data ‘creates a particular type of power’ among those that have it.
By being complacent in changing our privacy settings, reading a site’s terms of conditions and being careful about what information we give out online, we are foregoing our right to freedom.
By allowing websites to secretly gather data, present convoluted terms and conditions and trade around our sensitive information, the government is systematically facilitating our oppression.
Without significant intervention now, Australia’s future is one of vulnerability and subjugation.
Subjugation which threatens the very ideals of freedom and democracy shrined in our constitution. The very same constitution that enables you to petition your representatives to secure not only your personal books, but those of the generations to come.
Until then it must be remembered if you are not paying for a product, you are, in fact, the product.
Home
Help
Search
Login
