An interesting read about Internet Privacy, Security and Liberty:
https://hackernoon.com/internet-privacy-security-and-liberty-647d71bbf585The Internet was getting worse long before the fickle FCC removed “net neutrality” as a requirement for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Powerful internet and technology companies were already leveraging your data and networks to coerce behavior and force you to stick with their software or service. The internet as we know it was never neutral to begin with, regardless of what the FCC did. By the time most of us joined the internet, we were doing so at the behest of large network providers and their advertisers. We’re left with a consumer internet culture that cares about your privacy, security, and liberty as much as capitalism cares about your labor. Is there anything we can do?
The short answer is yes, but it’s not about regulating Facebook & Co’s use of your data, such as the EU recently did. To fix the internet, we must address the crux of how we connect and share. To understand that, consider the origin of the internet. It was a simple idea: computers could talk to each other over a wire, host and exchange files, and show you where to find stuff via hyperlinks. Pretty simple, right? One question for you: when was the last time somebody “called” your computer up and asked for a file? Or, when was the last time your friend searched through your pictures, by connecting to your computer directly and accessing files you put in a “public” or “for friends only” folder? Probably never.
The idea of computers connecting to each other was replaced with computers connecting through intermediaries, of course owned by large companies, with investors looking to make a profit. You give your pictures to Instagram, and your fam looks them up on Instagram. Thus they control the experience. The question to ask yourself is: Why can’t family simply connect their computer to yours, as the internet was intended?
That was actually possible, back when the web connected people through dial up modems, which sent information over a telephone call (with chirpy sounds). Back then, it was slow, but you could actually connect directly to your friend, as easily as calling their phone number. That’s not how it is with broadband and wireless.
With the internet today, your computer lives behind a private network, and that network belongs to your ISP. You can only “call” computers on the internet if those computers have a public IP address, and that’s what every website and app has. If Facebook is like a perverted Uncle’s digi-emporium, the ISPs are your daddy telling you “you can’t handle a public address, only what I allow through gets to you”. Inside the ISP’s private network, you don’t have a public address. The ISP routes data between your computer’s private address and the public internet. It’s literally impossible to connect directly to your friends’ computers via normal internet services.
This begs an inquiry. Back when the internet was taking over, why didn’t anybody say, “hey, what’s my internet address? so that I can receive packages of information in private? I don’t want anybody to know where it came from, or what’s in it, and I don’t want some company storing it and sharing meta-data about that information with advertisers!”
Not even your email is private, it’s exactly like everything else: sign on, send and receive emails through Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. The Internet, in all it’s technological and social supremacy, is tantamount to an alternate snail-mail paradigm where you must let UPS know everything about your packages inside and out, and you can only send and receive from other people signed up to UPS, and then UPS sends you a bunch of junk mail on top, after selling the information gleaned about you from contents sent and received. (You get junk snail mail, of course, but it has to be addressed to you directly, and the senders have less information about your private life, because the post office doesn’t scan all your photos and make correlations about your life, career, education, frequented locations, and social network).
The solution is simple. Maybe it should be pushed through democratic law. We must have our own public IP addresses on the internet. Maybe the Postal Service should step in and offer something. They were the original media service. There are more than enough IP addresses to go around, you could have a million of them if you wanted. Technically, you do have these addresses, they are simply not public, but masked by the ISP.
You want to talk about net neutrality, this is how you get it. When you own your address, you control who can access and read the contents of your digital world. You control your networks, your data, and what interfaces are used to read, post, share, etc.
What could Facebook possibly offer you in a world where you have hundreds of free and open source software options for representing your own identity, sharing, networking, publishing, searching, and meeting new people?
The tech industry, with all it’s crying over net neutrality, has not moved to give people the one thing that would create a truly independent web. Instead, there are outsider efforts building increasingly complex systems that attempt to get around this lack of address. Unsurprisingly, these complex solutions are not easily understood or adopted by the general public. Many of them would be unnecessary if we simply have our addresses. Instead, new tech companies pop up offering encryption, privacy, and security, but only behind their own sign-in and control over the whole experience. Meanwhile, the tech giants get bigger, and scheme ever more complex ways to invade your privacy, online and off.