a glimpse into the future of sharing

The all famous creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has put out the question “So what if you could type directly from your brain?” One of the main reasons he and his team are working on something like this is for people with disabilities and such so that they can still communicate online even with their disadvantages. However, how can we guarantee that some device like this will not catalogue every single thought in our minds? This is moving to conspiracy theory territory, but if apps like Facebook, Twitter and Google are already taking information from us just from what we type and say on our devices, having some sci-fi technology to read our minds is something quite powerful and terrifying in my eyes. Even if I’m sending a private email to my friend through Gmail, Google is already processing the things I type and personalising advertisements and so on to what they believe will pique my interests. Just like in Dana Boyd’s “Privacy: Why do youth share so publicly?”, there’s a segment titled “Public by Default, Private Through Effort” in which she describes two people chatting in a cafe, assuming their chit-chat is private but there’s always a change that someone could be recording their conversation. Since the day the internet was created, the lines that define our right of privacy are becoming more blurred and faint by the day. Information is power for those who obtain it, and as we, the consumers, find easier ways to communicate and share through our phones and laptops, it is also becoming easier for huge corporations like Google to use our information for their own benefits. I could dive down into a deep rabbit hole about conspiracy theories of what our future apocalypse will look like, but it is terrifying to think about what these big corporations know about us. I personally don’t share as much online, but who is to say what sort of information they are taking from, for example, my emails to my friend over in Japan. Probably the only person with complete privacy is someone who camps in the mountains by himself, away from civilisation and away from any satellite signal. The future is inevitable, that’s a certainty. But something I’m not so certain about is how stable our rights of privacy will turn out to be.