Privacy, Online & Off

 

• How do these issues affect you? Your friends and family?

• These issues affect me, all of my friends and family, as well as everyone else who has ever used social media. The fact that you can be ID’d from any picture taken, be easily searched, and have all of your valuable info leaked in an instant is a terrifying reality that we all have to face. Even if you try to keep your personal info private by setting your account to the proper settings, advertising companies are incredibly smart and know how to get your information without you even noticing it.Even if you try and keep your data protected it might not even matter, thanks to the large amount of data breaches that happen almost regularly. While there are options to protect your data, such as VPNs, these are costly precautions and the monthly fees associated with them will build up over time. These issues affect everyone who has even a small presence on the internet, and these issues will only grow and spiral out of control over time. 

   

• What should the government be doing about these issues?

• The government should be promising its citizens total protection online from any potential bad actors that wish to maliciously use information online for their own benefit. The amount of private info that advertisers easily gain, through the use of cookies and other internet tracking metrics, has turned the internet into a cesspool of constant advertising that’s fine-tuned to get us to spend as much money as possible. Online social media platforms are almost famously easy to breach as well. Companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have recently had massive security breaches that resulted in millions of peoples addresses, card info, DOBs, everything you can imagine, leaked for any bad actor to see. The Government should be forcing strict and high standards for internet privacy, so everyone online is safe and protected.

   

• What can we do to protect ourselves from invasions of our privacy? 

• In the simplest terms, the best way to protect yourself is to think about the information you are sharing online, and not post said information on social media. Keep your profile private, or limited to a few close friends you trust. Do not post sensitive media that could come back to harm you in the future; anything posted online can and will be found and used against you when you need to find a job. Much like how you should think before speaking, you should also think before speaking. No matter how hard you try, whatever you post can come back to bite you when you least expect it.

EOTO Blog: Netflix

For my EOTO Key Post blog, I picked the History of Netflix.

 

Before I can talk about the history of Netflix, I want to establish where the desire for a service like Netflix came from. 

 

Formed in 1985 by David Cook, Blockbuster was a video rental chain which rapidly expanded throughout the US near the end of the 90. While it was not the first video rental store (that honor goes to Video Station, which opened in 1977 by George Atkinson in Los Angeles), Blockbuster is arguably the most successful of its kind. At first, Blockbuster only offered VHS and Beta tapes, but its rapid success allowed them to carry video games, consoles, players, and even DVDs. While Blockbusters model was not perfect, with its overdraft fees being a massive punishment to anyone who was not able to get into a store in time, it was still successful and thrived in its time. The biggest thing holding Blockbuster back was its limited locations. While there were 9,040 stores open at its peak, you were out of luck if there were no video stores in your immediate area. 

 

That's where Netflix came in. Formed in 1997 by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, Netflix changed the media renting landscape by allowing users to rent DVDs online and have them delivered right to their doorstep. Netflix also made a big decision in getting rid of overdraft fees, and while this ran the risk of people flat out keeping the DVDs, Netflix thought about this and made sure that people could only rent out one DVD at a time. 

 

In 1999, Netflix’s model switched from a Pay-Per-View model, where a person could rent out the movies they wanted for a flat rate, to a subscription model, where a person would pay a monthly fee to have access at any time to the movie they wanted. At the time, Netflix’s biggest problem was waitlists. If you wanted a popular movie that was frequently rented out, you would have to sign up for a wait list and hope you would be next to watch. 

 

Netflix proved to be successful, and while it was much more convenient than the models offered by Blockbuster, the two models could exist at the same time because they both had unique upsides and downsides brought by their different models. However, this all changed in 2007 when Netflix introduced streaming, allowing users to skip the needs for DVD delivering all together, instead allowing them to stream films to their homes in an instant. While this required a strong broadband connection, which was not something all houses had at the time, it proved to be a massive success. Around 2010, when internet connections became more powerful and affordable, Netflix had grown to more than 20 million subscribers and were making around 2.1 Billion dollars. 

 

The streaming department for Netflix quickly took over its DVD service, and by extension all other video rental services. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and all other stores either followed suit, or had closed years before. Netflix massively changed the way that we consume media in the modern age. The worst part of Netflix's success was how its spawned countless streaming services, all fighting over shows and movies to keep behind their paywall. Modern streaming services have basically reinvented cable, with the introduction of ads, higher priced packages for different shows, and even live TV. What started as the alternative to cable has basically become what it sought to free the masses from.

 

As someone who loves to collect all sorts of physical media, the death of video rental services, and video stores in general, is still one that upsets me. While some forms of physical media have come back recently, like vinyls and CDs, a lot more interesting formats have bit the dust, never to return in the same form they once had. VHS, DVD, Bluray, all of these formats have dropped off in popularity thanks to the convenience of Netflix being more desirable to the average consumer.

 

In the end, Neflix changed the world of movies by allowing the public to stream movies into their homes. No more would they have to go to a theater, or the store to buy a DVD.  No more would people have to suffer overdraft fees, because Netflix was now king.

 

 

Two Values of Free Speech

 

After reading through the Eight Values of Free Expression, the two that stood out the most to me were the Marketplace of Ideas, and Protect Dissent. These two topics are the best summaries of what makes America unique, and what gives us freedom and protection when it comes to speech. They are personal to me, and every other American in the US, as they protect our ability to discuss our thoughts in the open, online, and in the press. On a similar note there is Protect Dissent, which protects our views which are in the minority

The Marketplace of Ideas first came from Justice Oliver Wendell during his dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States. The metaphor puts the importance of free speech and expression into simple terms, by comparing it to a market, where everyone is free to bring their opinions and discuss them, much like how one can bring their goods to a flea market. The Marketplace of Ideas also discusses how information that is true will always drown out information that is false. 

The Marketplace of Ideas is one of the most important things to keep in mind when discussing the ever evolving world of social media. While our right to free speech is constitutionally protected, it will not be protected from private companies' social media websites. One of the biggest examples of that is hate speech. Even though it is protected by the First Amendment, hate speech is one of the quickest ways to get banned on nearly every social media platform. These companies are private, and normally have the government and advertising corporations breathing down their neck to make guidelines stricter and stricter in order to appease them. 

However, the Marketplace of Ideas falls apart when it is used to analyze the spread of false information spread online. While it states that the truth will drown out false information, this could not be further from the truth. The internet has bred a lazy person, one that does not care enough to look further into the information they are presented, instead they take it at face value and blindly believe it and spread the word to others who have the same beliefs and biases as them. If any information comes out that either disproves the statements or provides evidence that another way will be more beneficial, its disregarded as ignored, as it does not fit the person’s biases. The Marketplace of Ideas, while it was a strong concept and worked when it was created, seems to be less and less true in the ever evolving age of misinformation. 

 

 

The second topic, Protect Dissonance, is one that is just as important as when it was first written about. The US is fueled by its arguments, as arguments are the only thing that pushes for progress. The Civil Rights movement and Anti-Vietnam protests are just two quick examples of why protecting the minority opinion is important; it allows for serious discussion of what is wrong with American society. Criticism of the Government is also one of the most important things that this protects, as a healthy leadership must be able to take the thoughts of the American people and use them to improve the Country. Overall, both the Marketplace of Ideas and the Protection of Dissonance are important topics in the rapidly evolving digital world that all of the citizens in the US live in.