I'm a college student and am wanting to write an essay on the need for privacy on the Internet. I want it to be really accurate and compelling both for the essay and to convince my friends and family. I was hoping someone could give me some pointers or direction to some credible hopefully scholarly sources.
I would of delivered my Speech if MS Word didn't shit on me.
That sounds bad, sorry
In what context, exactly @dan4skin?
I don't know an incredible amount on the subject, but I've done similar speeches in the past. I'm sure you can find knowledgeable people on this forum.
For starters, read this:
and you will begin to understand the state of internet privacy in our modern age. You basically have no rights to your own data, especially in the United States. If you're going with internet privacy, you might talk about the many facets of the internet in the modern age, like SMS text messaging, which is short e-mail, and apps like facebook, which geo-tag your location when you use them.
At some point, I would mention the value of privacy and why it matters, why anyone should care. Most people who understand the lack of privacy, or even the basics of what the NSA is doing don't understand the implications on greater society, and the already existing research of what happens when we have no privacy. The other thing I would mention is that in the past the government spied on us, but they didn't store such information at the scale they do now.
I don't know exactly @Ramiel, whatever I can write a 7 page paper on. Thanks for that souce, do you have a source for a study on what happens when we have no privacy?
You can lookup the "market research" that google searches, Google Chrome keylogger, and Windows 10 Cortana do.
For example, google searches are tracked unless you install a plugin in Firefox called "Google Privacy" and THEN check the setting "Replace original links."
That Add-on's page has lots of info to read about.
privacy monkey - which blocks 3rd party cookies in ads like in Facebook
BetterPrivacy - which allows users to delete "super" cookies created by Adobe flash
Also check out the videos on youtube about turning off Cortana & note why they say to do this
Here, have anything I can think of to Internet privacy in 10 minutes:
Well since privacy in the Internet is heavily influenced by the different actors on the field you have to have a look on their stance on the matter*:
I would read up on the stance of:
The Tor Project
US Government (can't help you there I am German)
The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation
Big Silicon Valley companies that do Web 2.0
Some Privacy-Extremists**, look around for American White-Hat Hacker
Tim Berners Lee / Richard Stallman
I do not know of any real research papers on the Topic because it is quite recent but some anecdotal Evidence for Privacy in Action are:
Another interesting resource might be the CCC (the Chaos Computer Club) the largest hacker association in Europe: Here is a channel with English talks at their Annual Congress or Camp. Just search for privacy. Turns up something like: Embracing post privacy
FireChat, an App that provides off-the-grid messaging, Another Article on the Topic here.
The Turkish Government Blocking Access to Twitter make sure to read up on the whole story, there might be some Information on the impact blocking something like that has. There are some pictures with Graffiti of the Google DNS Server Adress (which is 6.6.6.6) sprayed on walls in Istanbul
To understand privacy on the Internet you should understand the rough technical aspects of VPN as well as HTTPS (especially the X.509 certificates).
For example: Companies use their own certificates to have an insight into the https connections of the employess browsers, due to technical reasons that is necessary because businesses tend to run centralised anti virus software.
Message verification and authentication is also a concept that should be looked at (just google Bob Alice and Eve that leads you right to it). Asymmetric Cryptography is something you should look at.
You should really put your essay on a solid base since not understanding the technical details of it will put your reasoning on feet of clay.
Take a look at deep packet inspection at the benefits of it and the problems that arise from it.
Take a look at self-censorship. Facebook of all companies did some research on it
Effects on the individual and on society can be seen at the example of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany, you know) and the Stasi (Staatssicherheit, rough translation is state security) which had an extensive record keeping policy as well as opening of letters.
Another popular example are the "pink lists" of the Weimar Republic (the interim democracy between the German Empire and the Third Reich) where lists were kept of known homosexuals. Those lists were later used by the Nazis to round up those sexual deviants and put them in concentration camps. Moral of the story: Don't collect data you do not immediately need.
Since German has a word for everything there is another term that has no English direct translation: "Datensparsamkeit" meaning to be economical with data
Armies open the letters their soldiers send home. There is censorship going on there. You could take some examples from there. Using these rather analogue methods of surveillance as an analogue for internet privacy is valid since there is no real difference between "the internet" and "the real world". It's always someone elses computer and there is always a real person at the other end.
I'll write again if I think of something else.
//Edit:
For example the CIA director making privacy advocates responsible for the Paris attacks.](https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/666247249681391616) So our own fault really :(
*in comparison: The topic of thermodynamics is not really influenced by different opinions of people towards it.
**A term like "Privacy-Extremists" grants triple points in a game of bullshit bingo
You might look into scientific papers concerning trust on the internet.
Forgive me, this post is going to be a bit long winded, and probably full of a lot of sources from VICE.
7 pages? I mean, it's really up to you how far into the rabbit hole you want to go. You could write 7 pages on government and private organization's metadata collection alone, and still only touch the surface of the subject as a whole. Also, I'm not sure if you're in the US or elsewhere, but it really doesn't matter. Evidence suggests the US spies and collects data on everyone, regardless of where you are.
Just about every episode of The Tek covered this issue, including the most recent one. I would suggest you watch it.
Alas, I do not have the specific study on-hand that I was thinking of, I read it some time ago. However, you can cite sources like these:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/003050736990004X
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED131515
I found these just doing a quick search of 'human privacy needs' that I'm sure you could easily connect to the topic. ^you can also connect these to 'Maslow's hierarchy of needs,' which is pretty much the base of any psych class.
I would also mention the fact that in the post-snowden era, the public has already changed their search habits on the internet:
PEW has a lot of decent polling on the subject you will probably want to check out, including:
So, part of the big problem I mentioned before isn't so much that the government and companies like Facebook are 'watching you' its that they store the data they collect. In an age where our own CIA director uses AOL, this is a big concern for a lot of us. The storage of largely unsecured digital information has led to things like the federal fingerprint database getting hacked:
Metadata collection is probably the fastest and largest growing sector of IT right now, and will be for a while. Companies are gathering data even they don't know what to do with. I worked with someone whose sole job at his new employer was for Google analytic and marketing. Its a huge business and everyone in the big leagues of the tech sector is doing it. As you can see below, it makes sense that governments are querying private companies- they're just as good at spying as federal institutions are:
By the NSA's own admission, they compared this type of data collection to 'stop and frisk':
Plus, back in 2013, our own government admitted the NSA was out of control:
I remember @wendell mentioning the lack of security and the back doors provided to our government has drove stock value and interest in US cloud storage down, due to a lack of confidence in system privacy, especially for foreign companies.
One of the topics covered in my journalism class was the type of system driven user content that 'talors' a journalistic experience for you. Sites like Yahoo drive their numbers by doing this. But hey, it's every site type, including porn. This article mentions that 88% of porn websites use tracking cookies and metadata to build the user an experience. This actually makes sense, because again, it will drive numbers:
Private Databases, even when private, aren't always secure, or the information is sold to third parties for other use, like this service that is using people's voice command recordings : http://motherboard.vice.com/read/strangers-on-the-internet-are-listening-to-peoples-phone-voice-commands
Even the once supposedly private medical information is subject to this type of data collection/breaching:
You also might want to check out this article, that is a bit opt-ed, but suggests that mass surveillance is worse if you're poor:
Finally, data and cyber security concerns have made this type of stuff a hot issue, and is reflected in our current political climate. http://www.vice.com/read/bernie-sanders-is-very-worried-about-your-data-1019
We are mostly unprepared for hackers and larger attacks that are bound to happen in the future as we enter an age of War that will happen on the internet. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-scariest-thing-about-cyber-security-is-how-unprepared-we-are
Privacy issues like these are some of the reasons organizations like Anonymous started to do what they do, and perhaps why they have grown so much now. Snowden changed the conversation for the rest of us, and this conversation on the topic will only grow. We are in the age of information that isn't quite as innocent as any of us remember from the post 2000s era. This issue has grown so much in my lifetime that an entire subculture has formed because of this.
Again, I apologize if this is long winded and not useful. Feel free to ask me anything else, I would be glad to help or even research this stuff.
No its not too long @Ramiel its all useful though i wish there were more non-vice articles and by the way I am in the US, Mississippi if your interested. And thanks @trzone, @Scia, and @Garfield all of yours are very helpful. I have to go to a late night lab so I will explore all of these further tomorrow and ask more questions if you all (y'all) are willing to help me tomorrow.