Importance of Online Privacy

Key points

  • Mitigation Strategy

With the recent growth in digital money, also known as cryptocurrency, it is important that we acknowledge the past, which has witnessed the factors that led to the rise in cryptocurrencies. People from all sectors of life, living in rural and urban areas have started to interact with it. As advocates for the adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency, it’s not possible to not draw comparisons between the two technologies – the BLOCKCHAIN and the INTERNET.  

The Internet has become an integral part of human lives. Most people spend hours on the internet, sometimes for entertainment and sometimes for work. Even children are growing up to this online life and consider it to be more important than their real lives. 

Most of the internet companies started with an objective to connect people with one another and with the rest of the world. This connection helped people to have better collaborations, more cultural awareness and also developed a global community. 

Now the main goal of these internet organizations such as Google and Facebook is to make revenue. In fact Google and Facebook were the first companies developed with the Silicon Valley start-up mindset of “First build the product, think about revenues later”. Even the focus changed from human-to-human connection to human-to-application connection. 

In order to keep the users engaged, big internet organizations developed an algorithm that will track all their online activities and based on this information will provide content to its users to keep them engaged. These organizations started to have control over the thoughts and influence the life of its users. 

This influence is being sold by big internet organizations as “targeted ads” to its customers and generating billions and billions of dollars in revenue. Apart from this social media has become the ground for dirty politics, to cause psychological harm to others and for many other harmful practices. This situation is when the organizations are safeguarding the data and only giving away specific data to governments and other organizations. Imagine what would happen when the data is given out unregulated or is hacked. 

Mitigation Strategy

At present, there is a substantial amount of awareness about the harmful practices that are implemented by various big tech organizations. Collectively, we could ask the government to build strict laws that will help protect the privacy of information of the users that is available with these big tech giants. 

Individually, we should try to be less dependent on the internet. We should opt for alternatives that are more privacy focused such as DuckDuckGo instead of Google search. We shouldn’t become a slave of social media and should always look for alternatives that are more privacy focused, for services offered by tech giants. 

We can also go for a popular crypto project, which is a privacy focused browser, which blocks all third party ads and cookies, known as Brave. Brave is considered to have the highest level of privacy among all the browsers. 

Brave uses its own Ethereum based cryptocurrency called BAT (Basic Attention Token), to improve the online advertising business model. BAT makers have indicated that all the user information is stored on the user’s device, making it secure and private.              

Disclaimer: The article is just to provide information and shouldn’t be considered as any financial advice. It is advisable to conduct thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency.

Photo by – Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash