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Big Brother By George Orwell: Meet Mark Zuckerberg

1662 Words7 Pages

The World Wide Web existed far enough into the past for the majority of people not to care regarding the specific date. It stands an abundant asset for school, work, and general entertainment. With all the useful features it brings, there remain a few negatives still. The internet, once an innovative place of discovery, stands now a place of caution with danger lurking around every corner. Lori Andrews writes regarding the privacy issues of the web in her essay, “George Orwell…Meet Mark Zuckerberg.” Already, in her title she emphasizes Orwell’s rational fear of “Big Brother” exists now on Zuckerberg’s social media site, Facebook. It happens to not just be Facebook that has fallen to data aggregators invading the privacy of no one in particular …show more content…

Every move made online stands being watched, collected, bundled, and sold to another. Andrews gives a terrifying statement when she says, “Dictionary.com (one of my favorite websites, which I use more often than Facebook) installed 234 tracking tools on a user’s computer without permission, only 11 from Dictionary.com itself and 223 from companies that track internet users” (714). The worst chunk remains that data aggregators have a symbiotic relationship with websites. A website will sell them personal information that, in turn, they sell to advertising companies. As mentioned before, this not just affects the online self. Even on social media sites, information remains being traceable and, “Mark Zuckerberg [creator of Facebook] makes up only 14.6% of the behavioral advertising market” (Andrews 710). Social media remains not even safe from the followers or friends of a person on Facebook, “622 people can witness everything she writes, every picture she posts. Six hundred twenty-two people can pass that information on to their 622 friends” (Orenstein 447). The innocent game of show-and-tell becomes a dangerous game of sharing that may never stop. There have been several cases where a young female has posted a picture of herself wearing nothing and sent it to a friend, who in turn sent or showed it to another friend. This game never concludes. It can ruin reputations and lives. Even with the internet’s advance into the future, it brings an unnerving amount of

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