Week 5 Blog Post
When the internet came about in the late 20th century, it was not intended to share personal and sensitive data, rather it was used to share knowledge, opinions, ideas, and photos. This was good and dandy, but it was before the internet was looked at as a business. Once the internet was seen as a business for advertisement, everything changed. This is where the surveillance and data gathering came into play because this is where the money is being made, through companies buying advertisements and targeting potential customers of interest through pop-up ads that we see in our social media feed. What I think is crazy, is that us consumers get so annoyed with pop-up ads, yet we are so used to it now and most people don’t care if their personal information is shared. Maciej Ceglowski made a great example about Facebook users. Just because they know they are being surveil-lanced, doesn’t mean they are going to just stop using the app. As long as friends and family are still using it, that user is still going to use it because everything is so centralized on the web. Maciej also explains how we can still fix the online world and to not give up on our rights as internet users. With that being said, I agree, and I think that we need to have more educational classes about the internet in this day and age so that we can build a better understanding and future for the next generations to come.
