Mission 2 - Culture Post 2/3

Mission 2- Culture

Resources

Blog post 2/3- Digital Privacy

25-9/10+11/19

For our resources we used many different websites and search engines which we referenced in our powerpoint. For our experiment we mainly used Youtube, Safari and Notes.


Typing out the research I carried out helped in the sense of I kept referring to it and using it as guidelines to what I should put in the PowerPoint, I definitely will be using this method in the next mission, as it really helped with time keeping and staying in track, the information I typed out in the notes was backed up by iCloud so I had that information on my phone, MacBook and iPad so I could look over it whenever and wherever I wanted.

So after brainstorming all the different things we can do our project about, we chose to do our experiment on how our search engines for ad purposes, to prove this we used.

For our experiment, we used Safari on my phone, to see if we got an ad for the cameras, and the app we used to check if we go the ad was YouTube, we screenshot both results and used it in our powerpoint. We also went to the library to use the computers to work on our powerpoint.

We concluded that using a private search engine prevents safari from obtaining our information and we did not get any ads after we concluded our experiment through a private tab. We made sure we cleared our search history and made sure we repeated the experiment multiple times so we got a fair and unbiased result. We checked our apps every hour to see if we got the ad. 

Although on the other hand using a normal tab we concluded that apps such as Google and Facebook collect data and we received ads based on our search engine.

We learned that companies personalize advertisements to fit the individual's interests using their data and search history. It was nerve-racking to discover how much control companies have over your personal use and so many of us are giving away our personal data without realizing what we are doing.

From my research, I found that this issue isn't new. In the United States, Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike blasted Facebook for neglecting to misinform its users about the voter suppression ahead of 2020 US Presidential elections.

The founder of Facebook, Zuckerberg faced off aggressive questions on election interference, free speech, hate groups and fake news. Most of the concern was to do with third-party apps obtaining users personal details to push their agenda and to push fake news to change the voter's opinions. This comes after Zuckerberg promised to increase privacy after evidence appeared of Russian tampering in the 2016 presidential elections. Cambridge Analytica was found to be guilty of breaching Facebook's privacy guidelines for collecting users personal data and using it for its own personal gain and agenda.

Although Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook has made mistakes on these issues time and time again there hasn't been any significant change in this practises.

This was a very fascinating mission to work on and one that has educated me a lot on privacy issues. I've learned a lot from my research and I am now a lot more cautious giving my details to apps.

Thank you for reading my blog post!