Mission Two - Why We Chose Data Privacy

For this second mission, I looked through all missions provided to pick from. I had plenty to choose from and was interested in the majority of them. I thought that with the rise of augmented reality, it would be really interesting to see what’s out there that we don’t know or to just go more in to depth about what is already widely known. I was also interested in blogging, and thought about how blogging has hugely evolved into ‘vlogging’, what the difference is, and how easy it is to make a blog and also to make blogging a full time job. I also liked the idea of activism as it’s so huge right now, not just in America but actually in our own country. Just recently there was a march for students and there’s been many political stands throughout even just the last year.

But what trumped everything else was data privacy. I’d had a talk on it a few years ago, and it peaked my interest again when I saw it as an option. The talk I’d heard was all about how easily our privacy is taken advantage of and how simple it is to view information that people think is private and hard to see.

I then thought about what I use my laptop, my phone, in college, etc – and how I use them. How much of that is actually private? Who has access to it? Is it so simple that I can find it or does it take a bit of skill or is it some higher-up companies that can only view it? I was intrigued to see what our data is used for, why it’s used and to what extent it’s actually used. Are we all just statistics that add something to a bigger project or do companies know everything about me, the people I have connections, the people they have connections with, and so on? I wanted to know how private did we really have to be for it to be effective or do we really need to be as private as we all know of? Is it really that big of a deal or are we all just numbers and statistics?

Instead of it being discussed amongst ourselves, we were just put together based on what topics we picked. Once in our group, we discussed what these things meant to us – were we what we believed private people or did we use the same password for every account we’ve ever had? It was nice to reflect on this and see everyone else’s opinions and takes on the topic of digital privacy. We then talked about what kind of questions we wanted answered and what sub-topics we found relevant for this topic. We wanted to make sure that we cover enough ground to give everyone a decent enough understanding of the topic when they walked away.