I don’t need to tell you that access to the Internet has become a basic necessity in our everyday lives. Alongside being nagged into buying YouTube premium, this is where we come to work, find relationships, make money, seek entertainment, a ride home, to pay your bills, to buy or sell things you don’t actually need and so on. With the boom of social media (for better or worse) we are more interconnected than ever before and a new generation is growing up who no longer really understand how the Internet works, despite their entire life being public on it.
The Internet is a modern marvel
We are beyond the days of downloading files from questionable peer-to-peer networks that historically destroyed the family computer. The Internet is no longer a place you ‘go to’, it’s with you at all times and while you are less likely to download traditional malware, there has been a disconcerting shift in how we evaluate the danger of being visible to the world at all times: slowly our privacy is being surrendered for convenience and turned into a product by (and for) technology giants. The Internet is a modern marvel due to its size and how fast it enables us to communicate. It will naturally form its own echo chambers and just like any medium, will echo the best and worst of people at scale. The sheer size of it is the reason it's desirable to have control over it, and whoever does that may not have our best interests at heart. Keeping it neutral is more crucial than we think.
Before I adjust my tinfoil hat, let me go ahead and say that the shift is not necessarily a technical one as while there have been staggering advancements both in hardware and software enabling the world wide web, the core networking concepts are largely unchanged. The shift is more in our behaviour and how tech products seek to exploit our lack of understanding of how this high-speed information highway works both ways. We buy smart devices that continuously scan our home network, smart TVs that take secret screenshots of what we are watching, apps that record our GPS coordinates and home automation and IoT devices that if left unchecked, is a step away from the Big Brother house. Websites that we visit have evolved into tracking you by any means necessary: recording the size of your screen, tracking your cursor, playing inaudible background music to be run in the foreground, serve tracking ads and even try to identify you behind VPN connections.
Policies that expose far more of their life than is necessary
You may be thinking “I have nothing to hide, I don’t care about my privacy on the Internet, I just want it to work” which is a very dangerous attitude. Once it's lost, it is never regained again. Another alarming tendency is that there is a new generation who can no longer differentiate between WiFi and an Internet connection, automatically consuming and creating content without understanding the mechanisms under the hood and who are more easily pushed to accept policies that expose far more of their life than is necessary to organisations just to maintain that stimulus and social interaction.
And honestly, who can blame them? You aren’t required to have a licence to access the Internet and you shouldn’t need to know how to set up VLANs to protect your network, or how to set up your own network-wide adblocking PiHole DNS server before you can visit your first website.
Although, while these things may be beyond the technological know-how of many people, at the very least we should all be trying to learn more about how to protect ourselves.
Take it steady, arm yourself
It takes only a couple minutes to follow a guide to find out how much data Google holds about you. If that result got you horrified, you may take the next step and consult some of the recommendations on privacyguides.org. Take it steady, arm yourself with some browser plugins like PrivacyBadger, uBlock and so on. You may even enjoy the process and end up building your own homelab and network rules where you see, understand and are in control of all traffic. No matter where your journey into online privacy takes you though, I think we should all be more afraid of the Internet. We have every reason to be.