Lately international news agencies have been flooded with reports, criticism and concerns about harvesting personal information on digital platforms, Facebook in particular. Its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people on the planet, was recently grilled by American congressmen over the issue. While Zuckerberg agreed that his company had not done enough to secure data, Facebook, he clarified, does not “sell data to advertisers.” I was once told in the US by an ex-officer of National Security Agency (NSA) that every single Facebook post and Twitter feed was recorded at the Library of Congress. I was shocked. If you go to the Library of Congress (LOC), the official library of the US, you can read about Twitter “donating” its digital archive to LOC. A 2010 press release on its website says, “Today the Library holds more than 167 terabytes of web-based information.” However, in 2017, it limited the number of tweets to be archived and did not record all public tweets.
The NSA person had further said that when you enter certain keywords on search engines like Google, you could be under surveillance. When I told him that I was researching Al Qaeda, he said the place where you do your search also matters. In my case, it was mostly the library of my university, which he said would be relatively safer, perhaps because I wouldn’t be looking for Al Qaeda all the time or even if I did, it would be related to my research. Anyway, that made me realize, what you search on Google or share on social media would be monitored, and that could be considered as evidence if there was a criminal case later. Crowdsourcing!
On Google, you can basically find anything and everything. Whether you want to know about appendicitis, Nepal’s armed conflict, or potty training, you can Google. It has been such a part of life that even my two-year-old son holds my cell phone close to him and says, “Okay Google.” But hey, Google follows you all the time, locating where you went, recording what you bought, what you searched or deleted, keeps information of what apps you use, and it even has an advertisement profile of you. Well, all of these may still be fine if not misused, but who knows?
The times have changed so dramatically in the last 20 years or so that imagining a life without Facebook or Google is almost impossible, almost everywhere in the world. There’s no question that internet brings people closer and provides a plethora of good information. But it is not without risks. There have been reports in Nepal too of cybercrime and police action. In fact, police suggest we do not share status of where we are travelling or what we are doing so that we don’t fall prey to criminal minds. So, next time you post anything on social media or search Google, just be careful. Your searches and posts could be monitored from places unknown. OMG!
