1984
paper part 2 By Chris Ferran Section 8
`In my first installment
of my final paper I discussed the book 1984 and how its predictions about the
future where the government is always watching you is slowly coming true. I talked
about the internet privacy bill that was passed by both the Senate and House of
Representatives and I talked about why the Senate and House of Representative
members decided to pass this bill. For this paper, I would just like to discuss
why you should care about the internet privacy bill and what you can do to make
sure a bill like this never passes again.
There might be some people who don’t care if the
government or other private corporations take our data against our will. Some
might think that since they don’t look at any nefarious sites it shouldn’t
matter who sees their information. While this is a valid viewpoint I would
counter by saying that there is a small chance that all the information that
the government and corporations uses could be leaked online by hackers or even
the company itself. Even if you have never looked at a single site that you
wouldn’t want other people to see this could still be a major problem for you.
Chances are you have used online banking or some other website that has your
credit card and other private information like a social security number. If
these were to be leaked online, people could see all that information and use
it to take all your money.
Even
companies aren’t faultless for putting private information online. One example
of a company who has put people’s internet history online without their
permission is AOL. According to an excerpt from a book by Lori Andrews entitled
“George Orwell…Meet Mark Zuckerberg,” In 2006, AOL made public more than 20
million queries entered into its search engine from 658,000 users on its Web
site research@aol.com...But the project ended up breaching people’s privacy. In
some instances, people could be identified through the types of searches they
undertook.” Some of the users had searches like “what a neck looks like after
it has been strangled” and “rope to use to hog tie someone”. These searches
sound nefarious and if somebody found out who searched for these things than it
could ruin their lives. The problem with that is that they could have looked up
these searches for innocent reasons. They might just be writing a book and were
trying to make sure the book was as accurate as possible. In other words, you
might think that you don’t have any searches to hide but if someone looked
through your entire search history out of context then they might find some web
sites that look far from innocent.
One
way we can have our voice heard is to boycott the companies that were sending
money to the Senate and House of Representatives to pass this bill. These
companies were well within the law to do this, as lobbying is still somehow
legal, but that doesn’t mean it was morally right to do. The main companies
that were trying to convince the Senate and House to pass the bill were
Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, Charter Communications, Comcast, Century Link,
and T-Mobile. Sadly, boycotting all of these companies would be extremely hard
to do because the services they give are almost needed in this day and age.
Also, since almost all of the companies support this bill it would be extremely
difficult to find a company to switch to that didn’t lobby for this bill to be
passed. What one can do however, is contact the companies and voice our
disapproval. You don’t even have to completely cancel your plan with them, you
could just change your plan to the lowest costing one that you can live with.
If enough people did this than these companies would lose enough money so that
they might listen to us in the future.
In
conclusion, the recent internet privacy bill is eerily similar to the book
1984. We should care about this bill and there are many things we can do to
make sure a bill like this never passes again.
Sources
Andrews, Lori. “George Orwell…Meet Mark Zuckerberg.” Rereading America, edited by Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle,
Macmillian Learning, 2016, pp. 322-334
Orwell, George. 1984. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1949. Amazon
Fire HD 8.
First paper
Papers I made comments on
I liked how you gave examples that people could relate to!
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