Week 13 - Big Brother - Ars-onist

Is giving up privacy an “incontournable” to have access to resources in modern society? As stated by Varian, the general public tend to converge to give up the fight against the invasion of privacy to get specific returns like mortgage, medical, legal or digital assistant advices. (p. 380) By doing such, we must question the long term impacts of our decisions. As seen in oppressive regimes today, the results can be devastating. Perhaps, we should start at the level of education about our human rights namely, the one to privacy. The author underlines important impacts of Web Giants to whom we give more personal data in our lives to illustrate potential consequences. Is giving up our privacy a necessity in our life, or is it just a social tendency to standardize a past luxury? The society we’re building around surveillance capitalism is strikingly similar to a digital Panopticon; most astonishing however, is the fact that we’re joining it willingly.