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1. Introduction

Since the 2000’s, usage of internet has risen significantly¹, and has become much more integrated in our lives than ever before. As a consequence, with corporations expanding and attempting to handle the huge amount of traffic passed through the world every day; modern data centers, and AI, are draining water supplies fast, and the consumption of natural resources is increasing.

2. Background

Today, most people store their data in the “cloud”. Many people do not know what this exactly means, and it is taken for granted. When services say that your photographs, videos, playlists, passwords, and applications are stored in the cloud, they say that your data is stored in computers which send you the data you want when you make a request to it. These computers, called “servers”, are located in data centers, which are large buildings similar to warehouses. The number of servers in these data centers vary from 500 to more than 5000².

Introduction

Today, many corporations and governments are opting for an ID verification before a user can access a service. What gives?

What’s Happening

This situation started rapidly developing after the UK introduced age-verification-by-ID to the masses under the Online Safety Act. It’s supposed to “protect children, as well as adults, from illegal and harmful content, mis- and disinformation, etc.”. Big goals, for what is a simple ID scan.

As for how the identity verifications are handled: There are no regulations! There’s no one standardized system, and users may not even know if, or for how long, their personal data is stored. They may not know where it’s stored, either. The complete lack of transparency is apparent.

“Why should I care?” is a question often asked when the concept of privacy is discussed. There are plenty of reasons to preserve your privacy. Before elaborating on this, some terms must be defined:

Privacy, anonymity, and security are seperate concepts from each other.

This post is about privacy. Not anonymity, nor security.

Privacy: When personal data is kept from prying eyes. Personal data as a term includes what you search up on the internet, or a video that you watched. Metadata sent to websites you visit. Its literal definition is keeping something (like a conversation only between you and somebody else) personal.

Before I begin, I will say that for most people this is more a case of damage control than absolute true privacy. Aside from that, I will also not cover threat modeling in this post as there are two blogposts [1] [2] which explain what it is in detail. Please do read them if you do not know what “threat modeling” means. As a TL;DR, threat modeling is defining what you want privacy against.

Introduction

Recently, another exploit was discovered on the Turkish government’s web-based platform “E-devlet”. On this platform is stored a high amount of personal data that belong to citizens living in Turkey, such as:

Their student certificate/student transcript

Criminal record

Name, surname, government ID, mother’s and father’s name

etc.

Unfortunately, this important data is not handled with care at all, and there’s been leaks in the past. In Turkey, as soon as you’re born, you’re already out in the open.

Introduction

According to a speech Aldous Huxley made in 1962, on the contrary to the novel 1984, in which control is forced upon society; an authority figure must receive at least some form of consent, to achieve control.

He tells that with pure force and terror, authority can’t last forever, that it’ll eventually be faced with some form of backlash. And that society must eventually be convinced and guided.

Upon these thoughts Huxley had written Brave New World.