Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

1984 paper part 2

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



                                                                              

1 comment:

  1. I liked how you gave examples that people could relate to!

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