Week Eight

I think this unit will be interesting, because I’m one of those people that doesn’t really care about online privacy and where all my data ends up. I like it when my online experience is tailored to my interests and I don’t mind that companies are creating profiles on me based on the data I produce. I do know, however, that there are people out there that care a lot about their privacy, so I know that digital sovereignty is an important topic to discuss.

I thought that A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was interesting. I know it was the point, but it almost sounded like someone from early colonial American was writing it, which made it cool since it was talking about cyberspace. I loved the line “You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.” This puts into words a feeling that a lot of the older generations have about the Internet and online privacy. I think having control over privacy is a lot more important for older people because being online is something that is relatively new for them, as opposed to millennials and Gen Z that have grown up with it. Us younger people know that data collection and monitoring behavior online and that sort of stuff is pretty much expected and inevitable, but the older generations tend to not understand or trust these things as much as we do. And it’s completely understandable. This is kind of a dumb example, but to me it’s almost like this: I spent a lot of my formative years (middle school, high school) using Vine. Now Vine is gone and Tik Tok has taken its place. I don’t use Tik Tok and don’t want to because I don’t know much about it and I don’t trust it as much as I did Vine.

New concepts, like digital sovereignty, are scary for some, and simply daunting for others. With every new mass idea or product comes the need for regulation and attention from lawmakers and activists. Like Story says in ‘From Digital Sovereignty to the Web of Nations,’ it’s hard to create digital sovereignty laws and regulations because of how widespread it is. Different countries and regions have different laws and things already in place that make it impossible to have rules that govern all digital data. Instead, different places have to come to agreements with their neighbors and other places that try to regulate data as well as they can while respecting the others’ differing laws. People in certain places may be a lot more protected than people in other areas, and that is a little worrisome when it comes to digital equality – but then again, when has anything ever really been equal?