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Week 11: Privacy and censorship

This week's topic was censorship, privacy and the Internet and I'd like to talk about examples of both censorship and privacy.

The first thing that pops into my head regarding censorship is the famous Chinese app TikTok. Amongst TikTok already having tons of privacy issues and security risks, TikTok has also been caught censoring its content that would be okay in the Western world and Europe but wouldn't be in China. As TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, it cooperates with the Chinese government and they have said this openly before, although they don't really specify exactly how. But TikTok users have noticed how some content that is being posted is heavily censored. Examples of this are the BLM and ACAB movements and Hongkong protests. The app has only one main feed that you can't filter yourself, it just feeds you content based on your watch time, likes, and personal data. So when these movements were at their peak people started noticing how all of a sudden they started disappearing from the feed even though people kept posting them. Even the hashtags related to the movements were deleted or hidden.

An example of privacy would be one of the most downloaded apps ever - WhatsApp. I personally don't use nor have I ever used the app before, but recently the app has been on the news for its new privacy policies that they implemented in February. At the start of 2021 WhatsApp announced that they are changing their privacy policies, so if you want to continue using the app, you have to agree to them. As of February, WhatApp is sharing users' personal data with Facebook. While WhatsApp was collecting all sorts of data about their users before, like phone numbers, contacts, and even time-zones, battery percentages, network signal strengths, screen time, and all sorts of different stuff, now they are sharing all of this with Facebook. And the possibility to opt-out doesn't exist, this is mandatory. And all of Facebook's subsidiaries like Instagram will also have access to this information. So you could map out a huge portion of a person's life and personality just for advertisers to target them. To me, this seems like a new Cambridge Analytica kind of situation all over again, where all of this information could be used in a malicious way.



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