My Journey to Privacy

A decade ago, it was easier for ordinary people to start using the internet without having any concerns about being spied on. Accessibility of the internet hadn’t been grown like what we have today, so it wasn’t such a tasty platform for most of the people of the world.

However, that was a long long time ago and the accessibility and usability of the internet platform have changed dramatically. Some of us can’t even imagine living a day without our smartphones (or having the smartphone without internet). We schedule our days on it, we communicate to each other using it, we surf the internet and read books, watch movies, listen to music and basically a huge amount of our daily activities relies on it. Yes we are dependent to it. Is it bad? Not particularly.

This technology is more complicated than any advanced technology that the human race ever made. It isn't that simple to categorize it as a good or bad technology. The internet can have a lot of benefitical effects on our lives.

However, one of the potentials of the internet technology is that it can be used as a weapon. Corporations can use it as a marketing tool to trick people into buying their products or manipulate their desires. And the same sword in the hands of the state and media can redirect crowds of people to the goals that are not beneficial to all residents of the community or future generations. Of course in its basic soul, every knife can be used for good or bad reasons, but in a world which is fueled by money, it's almost always aiming for the goal of making the reach reacher, no matter what.

Yuval Noah Harari has a great talk which describes this matter more in depth. The video of this talk is available here:

Noam Chomsky shares the same mindset in an interview where he quotes Shoshana Zuboff to call this act Surveillance Capitalism. This video is available here:

As a software developer, I spend a lot of my life using the internet and I can’t imagine not using it. Actually, the relation of my country’s government toward the internet makes me to always carry the fear of losing access to it someday.

On the other hand, the news of privacy leaks (which are increasing day by day especially in the recent years) and learning the potential of these attacks made me to decide to learn more about it and try to prevent myself from being exposed to their potential harm. Of course, like a lot of ignorant people, I can consider myself an ordinary person and claim that there isn’t much interesting data on me to make me a potential target. But I don’t like to be played like a puppet in the hand of corporations or states.

This may sound easy, but it’s absolutely not. You can’t unplug yourself by choosing the right color of pill. To achieve this goal, I should work on my personal skill set as well as my computer skills.

As a personal goal in 2019, I want to share what I learn through my journey on this blog. Some posts may cover the technological aspect of the matter and some may share my comments on the ideas I learned within books or speeches. So this is it. Let the journey begin.