Week 3 Privacy and Big Data

Learning about big data this week reaffirmed my stance that I think many of these large companies should be respecting our personal information and private data more than they are. Its worrying and annoying that even things like taking this class is probably being recorded as meta data by some company. I enjoyed listening to the Privacy Matters ted talk by Glenn because its hard to respond to the statement why do you care if you are not doing anything bad, or if you are doing nothing bad you shouldn’t have anything to hide, because its hard to explain why we should want privacy of our personal lives from this large companies that want to use this info to money. So the statement the statement “society in which people can be monitored at all times is a society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission” (Greenwald, 1412946663) really stuck with me because it answered that question for me of why privacy matters to me. I also was interested in the talk from Andy Yen about email and how its not very secure, because I have always thought of email as being a fairly secure form of communication as long as your account is secure, but it interesting to hear about his analogy of and email to a post card how everyone that interacts with that message can read it. It was also interesting during his talk when he mentioned when talking about the companies that collect your info and where the revenue come from that he stated “In fact, this year alone, advertising is 137 billion dollars, and to optimize the ads that are shown to us, companies have to know everything about us.”(Yen, n.d.) and that a large portion of these companies revenue was coming from ad revenue, and it only really makes you think if they can pull so much information from email things like social media would be a gold mine for information like this.

Greenwald, G. (1412946663). Why privacy matters. https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters

Yen, A. (n.d.). Transcript of “Think your email’s private? Think again.” Retrieved July 11, 2021, from https://www.ted.com/talks/andy_yen_think_your_email_s_private_think_again/transcript