Technology companies ensuring online anonymity
Introduction
I don’t agree with the notion of technology companies managing society’s usage of technology in terms of surveillance, as it would somewhat be an invasion of privacy. But I agree that technology companies have the responsibility of managing security functionalities that can be activated by consumers (integrated in the web browser), which would could enable anonymity of internet users.
Literature Review
Privacy is a big issue when it comes to citizen’s usage of the internet. Since the revelation that the American government has been monitoring internet user’s activities through a surveillance program called PRISM, it has created an uproar among internet users (Preibusch, 2015). This revelation was revealed to the public by Edward Snowden in 2013, whom had hoped the deployment of new government would put a stop to ongoing surveillance of online users (Preibusch, 2015). Once the public realized the NSA had been monitoring online usage, they opted in using proxies to alter their identity to ensure their privacy (Preibusch, 2015).
GPS trackers provide tracking of missing vehicles for citizens. Since Snowden’s leak, is the general public content with the notion that government could use this information as leverage to track your movements (Nalina et al., 2015)? Well MI6 proposes that this information can be used for deterring terrorist attacks around the world (Sawers, 2016). Sawers (2016) further states that mechanisms used to encrypt data are being used by terrorists and the only way to protect civilians would be to monitor online activities.
Opinion
I don’t endorse the idea of anyone for that matter monitoring my online activities. I think its best, if the government already had suspects they need to monitor and focus their analytical searches on them. We live in a world of post-modernism, where sarcasm could be mistaken for acts of terrorism. Therefore alerting false positive results to the government.
Conclusion
Society wants to have a sense of privacy when surfing the internet, therefore all web browsers should be embedded with incognito options to sustain anonymity.
Bibliography
Nalina, V., Sandesh, A.S., Sequiera, R.D. and Jayarekha, P. (2015) ‘Cloud based multiple vehicle tracking and locking system’, 2015 IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (IACC), pp. 106–110. doi: 10.1109/iadcc.2015.7154680.
Preibusch, S. (2015) ‘Privacy behaviors after Snowden’, Communications of the ACM, 58(5), pp. 48–55. doi: 10.1145/2663341.
Sawers, J. (2016) Security first, freedom will follow. Available at: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/what-spies-should-see-mi6-terrorism-security-technology (Accessed: 20 March 2016).