Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am doing a one-off about digital privacy. Let’s get started!
In all reality, this subject is totally improvised. My projects for this week never reached a satisfying milestone, but my father kept insisting I may have something here. Point being: this is highly under developed, and my views will likely change in the upcoming months.
Most people I know appreciate at least a little privacy every now and again. Social norms vary depending on time and place, but in general, it’s as easy as shutting a door, closing the curtains, or hollering at violators when an honest mistake happens. Businesses partition off appropriate areas for customers to enact transactions. Doctor-patient confidentiality holds medical professionals accountable in case they disperse any of a treasure trove of possible gossip their jobs afford them. We’re good at intuitively carrying on reasonable privacy measures in the real world because our physical world has been engineered to suit our privacy needs.
But for all the privacy measures average Internet goers know, they may as well be jogging naked through the park wearing nothing but a fashionable belt advertised as guarding privacy when surfing the web (paraphrased from countless VPN ads).
The digital world is constantly being restructured and redesigned, and as such, so are the tools to compromise end-user privacy. Without naming any companies or products, more than a couple companies come out and outline their intrusions in that agreement hardly anybody has the attention span to digest, while others are caught committing outright espionage against their clients for foreign countries.
As I said at the beginning, this is still a rough rough draft, but I’d like to propose a number of categories to use when evaluating a piece of software:
Category 1. Malware
Nobody who even thinks he or she understands what is happening here will mistake it for anything else. Barring a user deliberately installing one of these programs to study its operation, these programs are unwelcome, and they’re out to get you.
Category 2. Trojans
This range describes software that performs a desired function, but only as a cover for spiriting in undesirable code. They rely on people either blindly installing it, either by lying about the payload or hiding the truth in ten pages of tiny type and calling it either an EULA or a privacy statement — either of which may as well be written in ancient Sumerian for all the typical user can digest.
Category 3. Trust
In the middle of this spectrum are programs that should be safe if they’re from a trustworthy party. Wise computer users evaluate how much trust a program needs vs how much it deserves.
The more access a program needs on the system or network, the more the user should trust it before letting it loose. The longer people have used it without someone sounding the alarm, the safer the program is. Transmission confirmation is also ab important factor.
Category 4. Open Source
Open source is your friend. By exposing the source code for all to vet, a developer can get tens of thousands more eyes looking for bugs that a relatively tiny professional team may have missed. Because once a piece of software is in circulation, bad people will start prying at it. And while open sourcing makes their job much easier, it also invites good people to do the same on an equal footing.
Category 5. Learning Tools
There is little more you can do to be worthy of trust in computing than to not only expose your well-documented code aside from using it to explain an example for students to learn. By stepping through the source line by line, a lesson explicitly aims to demystify the program in question.
Conclusion
While these categories are a general when applied to a spectrum, they have a lot of overlap. An open source virus is still a virus — but I have heard of an online museum displaying neutered malware that people spend artistic energy on, landing an otherwise category 1 program among category 4 or 5 programs. A technically savvy user can theoretically use some category 2 programs by controlling them with a fire wall.
Most people feel safe as long as they don’t have category 1 software infecting their computers. Ideally, I would like to see everyone going up to category 4, but 3 is more realistic. Unfortunately, digital landscaping companies these days pumps out category 2 software, putting profits above user safety. Without a working, up-to-date intuition on active threats, digital privacy is something that takes months or years of study to obtain.
As for me, I feel like the dim-sighted leading the blind in this matter. I’ve been upset for a while about certain companies with seemingly no accountability for the digital gossip they scoop up wholesale and sell to advertisers. I don’t like being sold.
Final Question:
How well dressed are you really when it comes to living in the digital world?