It’s a new semester, which means new schedules, routes, groupmates and, if all goes well, knowledge and opportunity. It also quite often means new books, technologies and … privacy agreements? As we’re rushing to adapt, we can often overlook important decisions about what the tools our community requires may extract from us in turn. Hear me.
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As I adapt to my own new-semester technologies, I’ve decided to opt out of this year’s CAMP programUndergrads can get all their textbooks for as low as $225 I go to Macmillan to buy a biology book. Though I’m buying a digital copy, at checkout I’m informed that the company needs my full address “for tax purposes.”I realize that I must accept a very restrictive privacy policy to make the checkout button work. I then tick the box, keeping an eye on graduation.
Next I open my new textbook in the Cornell Store’s VitalSource page, a sort of digital archive that stores textbook purchases. Navigating to my syllabus’s chapter mark, eager and Ready to learn, I’m interrupted by yet another pop-op: a cookies policy. Cookies are as follows: Emily Stewart at VoxSimply put it. “small files that websites send to your device that the sites then use to monitor you and remember certain information about you.” You’re probably familiar with the concept. You will see a cookies permission request on every page. Forbes to, I don’t know, insert something salacious here.
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But when I choose “reject cookies,”VitalSource logs me out, as I do often. I sign back in and read from a link below the apparently wrong button I’ve just pressed: it’s a statement about how the page requires first-party cookies to function. Yes, true. That’s how the internet nominally works. First-party cookies are used by the website you’re on to track you for site ease and function. VitalSource does not allow you to disable third-party cookies. These cookies are used by advertisers and other shady entities. “data partners”They will follow you around. Even the most salacious company that you thought of just a moment ago will allow you to opt out from such trackers as a standard procedure.
I imagine for a moment what my professor would say if I told her that I couldn’t do an assignment because my rights are not for sale. I picture myself delivering the line. Calvin and Hobbes –esque gusto. Maybe I’d be wearing a cape. I hit “accept cookies.”
Now I find in my syllabus something about a group project, for which I’ll need Discord. You see where this is leading? As I try to create an account, I remember why I don’t already have one. Like Twitter and many other professor favorites Discord denies access to users who have VPNs, VOIP numbers, or other privacy-protective tools. And sure, in one sense they do this to keep their sites clean (results: dubious) but in another, it’s rather convenient that doing so requires our most trackable information.
So if you’ve been following closely, you may have gathered that I like privacy and the tools that support it. It’s kind of my point here. You may not be able to solve the problem with just a few inexpensive or free changes, such as an adblocking web browser, encrypted texting apps, and/or a VPN subscription. the internetBo Burnham sings of it, but you can feel much better about your place in the behavioral futures market (see Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism).
Because of what’s called privacy dependencyEvery invasive measure you accept online is shared with your neighbor. Your digital footprint shows the digital footprints of others regardless of privacy preferences. A few minor modifications can help you to be a reasonable ethical member of society, just like recycling and sustainable fashion. This brings me back to school.
You may have heard that Apple, Dell, and Apple donate hardware for universities to encourage brand loyalty among future product ambassadors. It’s why we get discounts on Spotify, Hulu, Amazon, etc. It’s how they get us hooked. That’s fine. I’m not here to debate transparent capitalist incentives. What does bother me — and should bother you — are the sneakier, less mutualistic moves of a MacMillan, McGraw Hill or even a VitalSource. Coercing data contracts that are too strict is how education-industry companies profit from student reliance on their products. These practices are often supported by our alma matterer, and we are conditioned to accept exploitation.
I get it. Privacy agreements are not something that anyone reads. And maybe you’re the type of user who breathlessly hits the “accept cookies” button each time you see one — like you’re catching the last Pokémon. Our time at university is meant for us to be more able to plan and manage our futures. It is like refusing the Industrial-era workers safety instruction on assembly line safety in digital era. You’d think that was an exaggeration … but learning to read bids for our data and the amplified, manipulated forms in which it’s delivered back at us is a first step to media literacy. It’s a first step to identifying online propaganda and avoiding scams and hacks. It is the first step towards countering FOMO, online hate speech, and that “little bit of everything all of the time,” as Bo Burnham sings, with a rational, sovereign response.
So here’s what we can do (and by we, I mean the Cornell administration):
1. Replace AllBrave and Opera are the default browsers on campus computers. BraveSpecifically, it plugs into Chrome to do everything, while blocking trackers and ads, thereby saving bandwidth and being cost-free.
2. Suggestion: Students should use privacy-protecting applications SignalFor instance, a texting application called utilises end-to-end encryption to ensure that no one can see private messages.. Such a suggestion may seem oblique, but it’s a nudge, subtly telling our thousands of future alumni that there are better options and they are worth it.
3. Inform education-specific companies that engage in exploitative practices to tell them they must change their policy or find other buyers. A little more difficult. But not only could a large, leading institution like Cornell make this happen, they’d be praised in doing so.
4. Encourage professors and students to identify privacy-supporting technology in their course syllabi. Summarily stated, we shouldn’t have to choose between education and privacy.
This time in our lives marks a unique and powerful introduction into greater techno-capitalist societies: that which is impossible “real world”So often cited in university halls. We will always be influenced by the technology practices that are endorsed and enforced today by those who we turn to for answers. As I come to an end, I am reminded of how the Silicon Valley creators and users of privacy-reducing tech and apps do their best. bypass them — and ensure their children do too. This is, in essence, the most informed response. It is the cutting-edge digital conduct model. And I don’t know about you, but the cutting edge is just what I came here to learn.
Stephen Young is a Senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Science. Comments are welcome at [email protected]. Guest RoomThis semester, it runs regularly.
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