The internet’s evolution into the realm of social media has cracked open our private lives and strewn them across the World Wide Web, which isn’t far-off from the voyeur-like world of the Truman Show.
Posting our personal pictures, information, and experiences on Facebook, Twitter, or on whatever new social media platform is relevant these days, makes us vulnerable to surveillance and observation.
“I don’t think there’s much difference between Truman Burbank’s situation and all of us in the Internet era,” said Jason Wesbecher, CEO of Docket. “Facebook has just admitted to secretly manipulating emotions of 700,000 of its users right about the same time that the Washington Post reports 90 percent of the NSA’s Snowden documents aren’t about surveillance targets at all; they are about us and our lives: medical records, school transcripts, photos of toddlers on swing sets, and, yes, bikini selfies.”
So, what’s the solution? Wesbecher insists we need to use the power of the web in our favour, as opposed to allowing it to exploit us.
“We, obviously, still have choices,” Wesbecher said. “We can go off the grid, dump our social networks, and replace Google with the privacy-friendly DuckDuckGo search engine. But our obsessions with social media and the web means we are creating enough data every day to fill up 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads. I don’t think turning away from it all is realistic, however. We just need tools to make the web work better for us, instead of against us.”
Check out the full story on the Huffington Post.
