Why Online Privacy Matters - An Update.

On January 18th 2018 I started my personal website to publish my work, Ideally I would publish new original content as well as rebroadcasting my previous works, but back then I had a very slim catalog of personal projects.

One of my projects was an attempt to convey my viewpoints and ideas about technology and the digital age as a whole, but who months into the research process I hit a wall. My enthusiastic view of social media came in conflict with the Cambridge Analytica controversy in May 2018 and the project spun off into an article titled “Why Online Privacy Matters”.

The project’s research ended and the writing begun on March 16th and it quickly spiraled out of control, the thesis was too broad, the minimum amount of information to keep the flow going was too much for a short article but nonetheless I did my best to synthesize the project into a script for a short video on the topic.

This video was a 10 to 15 minute narration explaining the Cambridge Analytica controversy and tyeing it back to the importance of online privacy, the video was aimed at a non-tech savvy audience, so I had to include technical explanations for cookies, javascript, pixels, algorithms and as you might guess the structure got messy again. A new draft was created, it treated each topic as it’s own little video explanation, those 3 to 5 videos would build up to the Cambridge kerfuffle and finish on a broad invitation to fight outlandish behavior like the one performed by Facebook.

It doesn’t sound like a bad Idea, but the scope was too big for a personal project that didn’t made me any money and if I someday finished the message would probably gotten to no one but people that all ready agree with the conclusion. So the project hit a wall once again.

Since I was very advanced in the writing process I foresaw that once I got over writers block the project would quickly flourish, so on April 4th I published the list of documents and projects soon to be published in the not so distant future, of course including the article Why Online Privacy Matters.

The project went in a hiatus again, although little to no progress was done I went in and out of research for months. On my research I begun to go deeper into privacy as a right, the idea of rights became as critical as privacy itself.

I decided to go back to the drawing board just in time the work of Tristan Harris, Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig and Veronica Belmont’s work at Mozilla came into my attention, the focus would not longer be online technicalities like cookie tracking or algorithmic bias, the focus begun to morph into questioning the ethics of tech, trying to pinpoint those rights being violated and developing another perspective for online culture.

By pure chance and the power of my procrastination, it just happed to be that the re-writing process begun at the same time as my ethics class at university, the process of re evaluating simple moral and ethical concepts made it all click into place, rights are at the core of the issue, more specifically: Human Rights are at the center of it all.

New life was brought into the article on November 7th 2018 when it was re-purposed as a book titled Ethics & Human Rights Applied On The Web. It would be even bigger in scope than the original blog and the planned videos, so much so that it would serve as the foundation for an online activist group that aims to promote the ideas of the book, the project grew once again, but the progress was still very slow, the book is (as of publishing this) still under development and the same can be said about the activist group that accompanies it.

You can learn more about the project since it’s source is publicly available on GitHub, you can read the full book here and you can follow along and get notified when new chapters are available via this RSS feed. As I mentioned previously this project is one of great scale, if you want to be part of this you might be interested in our online activist group called Digital Rights, you can find our website here, get notifications with our RSS feed or follow us on Facebook and Twitter and help us spread our message.

Finally if you wish to be part of this project you can become a member of Digital Rights at no cost, if you’re interested in becoming part of us please get in contact via our official email.