Unethical human activity is primarily responsible for a lack of privacy and safety on the internet!

Did you know unethical human activity is primarily responsible for a lack of privacy and safety on the internet! ‘One of the major obstacles we face in protecting ourselves is that most social media websites are not designed to safeguard people who are targets’. (Blue, Violet, 2015, Chapter 1). Once something is posted on the internet for example your Name, Date of Birth or Address it’s stays on the internet, it then becomes available for anybody to access and do with what they please. That’s why I believe unethical human activity is primarily responsible for a lack of privacy and safety on the internet. Take a look at how many people have been taken advantage of on the internet, weather they have been scammed, spied and snooped on, had their information mishandled or their location tracked it all comes back to unethical human activity. Would you like to have your personal information given out to everyone? I know that I wouldn’t but that is what is happening to many people who become targets when unsure how to use the internet correctly. In the words of Edward Zalter, ‘Personal information or data is information or data that is linked or can be linked to individual persons. Examples include explicitly stated characteristics such as a person‘s date of birth, sexual preference, whereabouts, religion, but also the IP address of your computer or metadata pertaining to these kinds of information. In addition, personal data can also be more implicit in the form of behavioral data, for example from social media, that can be linked to individuals. Personal data can be contrasted with data that is considered sensitive, valuable or important for other reasons, such as secret recipes, financial data, or military intelligence. Data used to secure other information, such as passwords, are not considered here. Although such security measures (passwords) may contribute to privacy, their protection is only instrumental to the protection of other (more private) information, and the quality of such security measures is therefore out of the scope of our considerations here.’ ( Zalter, Edward, 2019). Some other examples of unethical human behavior on the internet are downloading or copying an image that is copyrighted, posting a picture without permission, giving false information for an online account, blocking advertisements, parody accounts, uploading copyrighted YouTube content, repeatedly sending direct messages and sending inappropriate text. These are all things that happen daily. It is possible that you have even carried out one of the above yourself without thinking about it. There is unethical behavior everywhere we go, and the internet is no exception. ‘Technology makes transparency even more important because studies show people are more likely to behave in a dishonest or morally questionable way when they can hide behind it’. (Barton, Eric, 2015). When using the internet, I am extremely careful of what I do and what information I use as I have learnt from experience that it is easy for people to gather information about you. Scammers will try anything to get your details and most of the time you have no idea who is on the other end of the conversation your having or who could be hacking your computer to gain your information for later use. According to statistics older people are most affected by unethical human activity on the internet but that’s not to say that adults, teenagers and children are not affected. I think the cause of most privacy and safety issues on the internet are due to people being unaware of how to use the internet correctly and what to use or do to keep yourself protected when using it. Many people act different in virtual environment than real life. Data protection laws are in force in most countries, but this doesn’t mean that all your information is protected. The Internet was originally conceived in the 1960s and developed in the 1980s as a scientific network for exchanging information. These days it is all too easy to access the internet and I am most certain that most people have it at home, that’s what it makes it easier for people to use it in ways it shouldn’t be used. I read about and see the issues people have using the internet all the time and it is all because of the unethical behavior that humans have when using the internet. The most recent example would be TicTok and how it collects your data from your smartphone, like contacts and location. The risk here is that all the harvested information about you could be handed over and there goes your privacy and safety. So in conclusion I will reassert the fact that unethical human activity is 100% primarily responsible for the now lack of privacy and safety we all have on the internet and it is up to the person using the internet to use it correctly so they are safe and their privacy is protected.

 

 

 

REFERENCE LIST

The Smart Girl’s Guide to Privacy. Copyright © 2015 by Violet Blue.
https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/the-smart-girls/9781457189937/copy.html

The Danger of Online Anonymity by Barton, Eric, 10th March 2015
Https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20150309-the-danger-of-online-anonymity

Van Den Hoven, Jeroen, Martijn Blaauw, Wolter Pieters, and Martijn Warnier, “Privacy and Information Technology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/it-privacy/>.