The Paradox of the Internet

  Hello my name is Ian Fay and I am a freshman at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I am currently working on an assignment known as the You and The World Project. What I will do is I take a very pressing issue and try to be an "agent of change" for the issue. Then I am to create a series of three blog posts for the issue (this one being the first). The issue that I chose to tackle is Internet Privacy, the issue of companies invading the online privacy of many online customers.

    The issue is interesting to me because the Internet is a big part of current technological history. It is a very reliable resource that most of the world has access to for information, entertainment, and many other things. However, It seems to lend itself to have perfect anonymity. If you have seen companies ask for your personal information then it is very wise to keep it a secret. All of these websites that you use are very susceptible to hacking. Over the years many insurance, video game, and entertainment companies have been hacked allowing the hackers to have access to personal information. This would lead to many crimes such as identity theft, hacking bank accounts of customers, and in a few cases stalking and murdering innocent customers. This is the reason why this is such a hard and murky issue to solve. The internet is an open tool usable by many of the world’s population but, these hackers can be camouflaged by the internet allowing for complete ambiguity. The issue itself is mostly seen as a paradox.


    What I and the many others who fight this issue hope to achieve in this issue is an idea known as net neutrality. Net neutrality is the idea of everyone having equal access to the internet. With it, nothing stops anyone from having a lesser connection or having inferior virus software than someone that is richer, smarter, a better job, etc.. That one principle is the keystone to having total equality in the internet. Unfortunately companies are planning to violate this idea of equality. While conducting research I stumbled upon a website that I found to be quite alarming. The site had a video that explained how these companies are doing this. Imagine a street with cars going at the exact same speed, this is how the line that cable providers such as Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable is visualized. Everyone has the exact same connections whether they may be people living in apartments or business tycoons with gigantic salaries. That line isn’t allowed to be interacted with by these companies, so what do they do? They create a separate line that has a better connection than the standard line. The only people who have access to this line are those that are willing to pay more money to use it while the rest are left with the worse connection. This discriminatory act is defying the very principle I and and those who fight this hope to uphold.

     While this may all look grim, many people have not given up this battle. The website that provided that video was a site named savetheinternet.com. These freedom fighters have created a big following that have voiced themselves to the world. Also a affected by this issue, minorly or majorly, then we can finally be rid of this problem for good. website named internetsociety.org helps employees manage their online lives to ensure that they do not face the same fate as other unsuspecting workers. This is where these people and I see hope. If more people join this cause we can once again achieve perfect net neutrality.

    The invasion of Internet Privacy is a very difficult issue to solve. There are many differing points of view, multiple technological snafus, and the notion of something as open as the internet allowing for complete anonymity is very paradoxical. It doesn’t seem to be feasible to achieve. However we cannot give up this fight. If everyone who feels

Annotated Bibliography     

States Laws pertaining to online privacy

Net Neutrality

Comments (2)