The Dark Web Dilemma | Eric Jardine | TEDxYYC

[Music] today we're going to take a little bit of a tour through technology and at the core of all of this is our growing societal problem of online privacy or really the lack thereof currently through a series of innocuous choices or seemingly innocuous choices we're barreling towards a world with very little individual privacy there are tools that currently exist which could catapult us from one end of this spectrum all the way to the other technologies such as The Onion Router or tor or gateways to a portion of the internet known colloquially as the dark web in this realm were anonymous by design and our privacy is pretty much as maximum as we can get what I'm going to pause it today is that we don't want to end up on either of these extremes that instead there are discrete practical steps that we can all take as part of our daily lives that would move the needle a little bit and land us somewhere more in the middle and so first I think it's useful for us to think about where we're going and why and at the core of that of course is the 3.9 billion Internet users and Counting that span the globe these sort of staggering statistics are borne out more generally and for example to 2.2 billion Facebook users the fact that every single day there are three point five billion snapchats sent around the world or the fact that for boat as long as I've been speaking to right now that's about one minute this equates to about 300 hours of consume YouTube video that's how many people are using these services as we move for more of a digital content platform centric universe into an Internet of Things reality we move into a whole other area of interconnectivity for projections are wild but one indicates that by 2025 as many as 75 billion Internet of Things devices could be interconnected into our cars our homes even things as silly as our toothbrushes our engagement with all of these platforms and with all of these internet connected devices generate data and that data takes two separate forms and I think it's useful to understand the first is content related information or content related data and it may be pretty straightforward to think about why content data might be personal might be private while you might not want everyone out there to have access to it but I think there's a useful little trick or example that I think can really drive this point home looking right now to the person beside you okay statistically speaking statistically speaking one of the two of you has likely engaged in what is known as sexting behavior I think the image on the screen gives you a sense of what we're talking about but this is sending sexually explicit messages pictures videos and things of that sort when you're dealing with that kind of content it's obvious why you wouldn't want companies governments random strange individuals getting access to the content of your messages but as I said this is one of two types of data the other type is what is known as metadata or essentially data about data or to put it in a little bit simpler terms essentially a record of for example who called whom when and for how long now that can seem relatively innocuous it's just a record of transactions essentially but a heaven thetic example I think can really highlight the point here so imagine three data points first one is a visit to a dating site the second transaction in this record is a visit to a sexual health website a couple of days later and then following that maybe a month later you have a visit to an abortion clinic website so these are three solitary little data points but already I bet a lot of you are starting to infer something about the person who's visiting these sites and really we can draw a number of conclusions I think from the what we just learned that the person is probably female probably single probably sexually active probably fairly young maybe 18 to 30 given that they were seem to be concerned about sexual health they probably have a decent level of education given that they're willing to at least visit abortion websites maybe contemplate having an abortion maybe they are also liberal politically they may be pregnant I don't know if anyone caught the timing of those particular searches but they were all outside of regular nine-to-five work hours so we may be able to infer that the person works a regular nine-to-five job as and as a secondary prediction from that you could maybe infer that the individual has a fairly decent in level of income and so those three discrete little points generate a pretty interesting and fairly clear picture about the demographics lifestyle choices and political ideology of this individual and that's three data points imagine how many data points you might generate with the searches you do in a day a week a month or a year and then once you leverage Big Data bade big data analytics and apply it to all of this information you get a scarily accurate picture of what people are like now if that amount of data that were generated wasn't bad enough the entire internet ecosystem the entire commercial world wide web is essentially based on a business model that emphasizes the collection aggregation sharing and monetization effectively of your user generated data this means in other words that there are a host of actors who have access to the data that we generate as we move through the internet ecosystem as a first order this obviously includes Internet service providers but it also includes the content platforms we engage with on a routine basis governments who can requisition all of this information and importantly as well third-party data brokers the Cambridge analytical schedule which was mentioned earlier today would be one such example but in the United States alone there are upwards of 2,500 to 4,000 discrete data brokers whose whole job it is is to take information about you aggregated together and sell it to somebody for some purpose advertising service provision something like that and so we have a bit of a privacy problem we built an ecosystem and we readily engage every day with an ecosystem that's built around the absence of privacy or the use of our personal data and I think there are a couple of reasons over and beyond just the fact that maybe we want to keep things private some of the time why privacy remains something important and something to be cherished in society the first is that as individuals we need a little bit of privacy if we're going to progress through our lives we all learn by doing and we all learn by doing failing and by making mistakes essentially historically we've been able to do that and we've become the people that we are but the baggage the bad choice is the things we wish people would forget those stay by the wayside now we live in a world where that's not what happens all the small choices all the small mistakes man I wish I hadn't wrote grit that wrote that post all of that is permanent and stays with us someone has access to that information and will be using it for a variety of purposes we may not know who but it does exist and is not going away and so our ability to progress as individuals could be stifled because once that realization sips seeps in once we realize everything we do is permanent we might start to self-censor we might hold back for fear of making mistakes and our individual progression as humans might slow down the second and related point is that social progress requires an element of privacy as well emile durkheim once pointed out that in order for society's progress you have to be willing to challenge the status quo you have to take conventional ideas and be able in the privacy of your home for example to turn them on their head to debate them to figure out do you really believe that this is right a good example would be the civil rights movement in the United States obviously everyone who hit the streets Martin Luther King and others developing ideas of political equality within the US context they'd were a prime mover when it came to the civil rights movement but were really gave the movement ultimate traction was the fact that individuals in the privacy of their homes could feel comfortable debating the ideas that were being put forward was it right to have a segregated Society or was political equality a better ideal in a world like we have today where a lot of our political communication is mediated via say social media platforms companies and governments increasingly have access to all of that information we can't have a private discussion which means we can't really challenge ideas that are part of the status quo and societal progress may suffer as a result and so we have at that one end of that privacy spectrum a problem and as I said there are a suite of tools like a catapult us all the way in the other direction these are the tools that are part and parcel of the dark web and the dark web is anonymous by design and there's a problem there with the ways in which humans tend to behave or react when we get anonymity and this is an age-old problem Plato in Plato's Republic they debated the myth of the ring of guy Gees that would turn individuals invisible and it was used as a tool to talk about justice because as soon as our actions lose consequences we can tend to become unmoored from our moral sensibilities and that's problematic for society as a whole and probably for us as individuals as well and the dark web does that by design it says you do what you want no one will know who you are it doesn't matter do what you want and there's problem there researchers from the United Kingdom have done a great job categorizing available dark web content and they found a pretty grim picture for instance about 15% of available tour hosted dark web content is dedicated to drug sites 2% is dedicated to what they categorized as child abuse imagery sites these are sites that disseminate or involve the production of child abuse imagery now that picture wasn't gloomy enough as is they took a secondary step as a part of their study because available contents one thing but where people go is another and that's what they attract as the second order phase if there was a research there they discovered a truly horrid statistic eighty-two percent of the site visits 82 percent of the traffic only have tor hidden service network was going to that 2 percent of sites dedicated to child abuse imagery and so it's clear I think that this extreme end is also problematic you're dealing with a cesspool of crime in a lot of cases and that's not a place I think a lot of us want to go so where does that leave us if we've lopped off the two extremes of that privacy spectrum where do we want to land and I would say into sort of Goldilocks fashion we probably want to be somewhere closer to the middle of that somewhere around here in terms of my personal sensibilities I would like to prioritize privacy when we can but recognize that there's limits and so maybe somewhere slightly to the right then the question obviously becomes if that's where we want to land and currently we're careening towards little privacy and the tools of tor in the dark web will take us too far in the other direction how do we get to that happy medium and I think there's two things that we need to do generally speaking to get there the first is we need to be sympathetic about privacy whenever I teach about privacy talk about privacy more generally one of the common refrains that I hear is well if I'm not doing anything wrong why do I need to worry about privacy or more generally if someone isn't doing anything wrong why do they need to worry about privacy and the problem is privacy is inherently contextually specific if your mainstream in term in society maybe most of the things that you do on a daily basis are pretty innocuous and there's not really anything to worry about there but if you're a minority group or something you might need more privacy in order to be free from discrimination for example and so there's a contextually specific reasons why some people might want higher levels of privacy than others and not for any reasons to do with a legality just reasons to do a social position more broadly than that if you looked across countries there's also a reason why some people and some regimes around the world might value being way on the extreme end even using the tools of the dark web and this is one of their only positive uses really is the ability for individuals and repressive regimes to circumvent privacy restrictions to circumvent censorship restrictions and to engage in basic political rights like the right to free expression and so inherently privacy is context specific and we need to be sympathetic about that we don't want to just default to you clearly are doing something wrong if you actually want some element of privacy and sec ting lee and i think a bit more problematic pragmatically we don't want to just give up on privacy because that's the other problem when you see an entire ecosystem built up around the idea that your data is what turns a buck it's hard to face back against that Facebook has 2.2 billion users what am I going to do against that kind of behemoth and I think within this category there's actually practical steps there are tools that we could use to increase our privacy that are well short of say tor in the dark web you could use for example a virtual private network or VPN that's a small step but it masks part of your Internet traffic in a way that's discoverable by law enforcement yet hidden from Internet service providers or the companies that are trying to build profiles about you you could use as well more private search engines what dr. Koh that promise to keep your data private as opposed to something like Google beyond that I think it's important for us to recognize that individually we may be weak but collectively we have a tremendous amount of power we are consumers and if we work in concert if we come to a social consensus that privacy is still valuable we can pressure the developers of the various services that we use to emphasize privacy once again this has happened Apple took on the FBI over a privacy issue because from their perspective privacy was a desirable consumer trait for their products we can do that I think more large-scale and lastly I think we can also pressure our elected representatives and government to try to come to grips with the fact that technology is not going away that we need to deal with the fact that data is going to be collected and data is going to be shared but the question about how much data to collect when how long could keep it what kind of rules govern who can share what all of that is still open and contested political territory and that's the role for government I think if we do this if we take those individual technological steps act in concert as consumers and get government to try to figure out something to do with the regulation of data I think we stand a chance of moving that privacy needle back away from the undesirables end where you have no privacy but we avoid the other extreme that we can land as I said in that nice Goldilocks zone in the middle thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 6,928

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Data, Internet, Philosophy, Privacy, Society, Technology

Id: 207RADPj7f8

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018