Michael Gatti
CS 3043 Anon: Information Privacy
A key addition to society’s lives in the movie Anon (2018) is an optical implant that is equipped with software to give their bio-data down to the nearest millimeter, their criminal history, current occupation, a lengthy family tree, and even their relationship status. All of this is done through a quick and simple glance of their face and has faster and more accurate input analysis than anything we have seen to date in our world. Along with this, with the proper clearance, you can access any moment of a person's life through their point of view. With such easy access to others’ information, and the constant use of augmented and virtual reality there is no information privacy in the world of Anon.
The ease of access to confidential information and the increased use of augmented and virtual reality make the ability to secure our own data almost impossible. The world is changing around us AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) despite the increasing cyber security attacks. This poses people's lives to be altered much more than ever before through the same breaching methods that have been used for years. Through Man-in-the-middle-attacks “Network attackers can listen on the communications between the AR browser and the AR provider, AR channel owners, and third-party servers.” [1] Despite the novelty of being able to look at an object and have an outside source that provides information on said object, it poses more security concerns about hackers than it will help humanity.
On page 144 of the Ethics for the Information age, it brings up the alarming thought that “Some people take the advantage of privacy to plan and carry out illegal or immoral activities.” [2] Regardless of the setting, when people are shrouded in anonymity and privacy, they feel they can conduct whatever they would like to. This is even echoed in our everyday lives where the US government, faced with the potential of the first-ever war conducted exclusively through cyberspace, must make the decision at what point is there too much privacy? The FBI has even followed the trend where in a court hearing “Comey made it clear that the government would continue to keep US discussions with companies and use indirect ways to carry on with their tasks” with the specific example being “[The] FBI allegedly paying $1 million to Carnegie Mellon University researchers to help break into Tor networks in order to track down criminals.” [3]. Despite the concern of what may happen in a world with too much privacy, there are sentiments from people that reflect that the companies are not respecting the boundaries of privacy. However, despite the concern from the government and large corporations about what may happen with the consumers/people having too much privacy, they are overstepping their bounds. Having third parties have access to the consumers' information poses a greater threat of data breaches and more information means more of that information then becomes public. TikTok is a notorious example of how much data they unnecessarily collect with the purpose posed as being beneficial for providing their customers with the best experience possible. It is known that they collect “[Your MAC Address], your location, IP address, search history, the content of your messages, what you’re viewing and for how long.” [4] Along with making plenty of assumptions about bio-data based on the information they already have. With said information, a foreign company can narrow down the precise identity of its users. Given this knowledge, it is alarming to say that they had their data breached back in 2020. In August of 2020, a security company called Comparitech was able to access TikTok’s (and a few other platforms) databases that had information regarding the user’s “names, ages, genders, and profile images records” along with “email addresses and phone numbers''. [5] This was done through a database that had no password for access and lacked the necessary encryption. At this point, the consumer should be asking themselves why a company should even need this information for such simple use cases.
References
What are the Security and Privacy Risks of VR and AR. (2022, March 30). www.Kaspersky.Com. https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/security-and-privacy-risks-of-ar-and-vr
Quinn, M. J. (2019). Ethics for the Information Age (8th ed.). Pearson Education (US). https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/books/9780135218006
Dickson, B. How Much Privacy Is Too Much? (November 24, 2015) https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/24/how-much-privacy-is-too-much/ (October 2, 2022)
O’Flaherty, K. All The Ways TikTok Tracks You and How to Stop It (October 23, 2021). https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-data-privacy (October 2, 2022)
Heiligenstein, M.X. TikTok Data Breaches: Full Timeline Through 2022 (September 6, 2022) https://firewalltimes.com/tiktok-data-breach-timeline/ (October 2, 2022)