Digital death is a difficult topic. It’s a somewhat uncomfortable subject and I don’t totally know where I stand. A part of me wants to have all my data magically removed from the internet the moment I die, and another part of me wants to let my data from sites like Facebook live on for anyone that wants to look at my old web page. The more I think about it though, I’m much more in favor of the first option. I don’t want a digital record of me to exist forever after I’m gone, maybe if there was some sort of time period where social media sites and any other accounts of my personal life were allowed to stay up, it would be better. If the pages stayed up for a year, this could give anyone that wanted to look at the page for grieving or closure a chance. Most people will have moved on by then and give very little thought to me or at least to my social media page, while the people that are closer to me will not need a website for remembrance.
In this article and our classroom discussion, a person’s death is made public by social media or a newspaper article. In the case of our classroom discussion, the method of how the CSUMB professor died was made public in an article written by one of the schools where she worked. I was listening to many students discuss whether or not it was right for the school or anyone else to make it public that the professor had committed suicide. Some students said it shouldn’t be made public, some said it should at least be kept from her students and others said that the announcement could help someone else that was considering suicide by bringing awareness to the issue. I couldn’t make my mind up on what the right thing to do is, but I started to realize that conversations would frequently take a turn at one point to a place I didn’t like. At some part of the discussion, a student would say something like, “I was looking at her Facebook page and she seemed like a pretty happy person. I wonder why she did it.” I can understand being curious, but this always made me feel uneasy. It was almost like people stopped caring that someone had died and started trying to play detective and guess at why she would have done something like that. This happened a few times in this discussion and I think in this case, I would have preferred if the specifics were never announced. The people close to the deceased should be allowed to know, but I don’t think information like that should be made so publicly available, word of mouth should be adequate for something so sensitive.
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The internet is an interesting place. We’ve spoken about a lot of issues in class that are quite serious, but it always seems to be the simplest things that catch my attention. Talking about online privacy was an interesting topic, but for some reason I’m much more interested in stuff like the article, Google develops invisible web security Captcha form. I’m not sure why this is so interesting to me, but I think it’s awesome. The article talks about Captcha forms, the small check box or otherwise “prove you’re not a robot” forms, completely or very nearly completely disappearing in the near future. Proving not to be a robot is a very valuable feature on some sites as it can be used to prevent automated password attempts as well as some other things, so I’m completely happy that there is some system in place to check for this. Google has developed some system of checking the way a person interacts with a website in order to bypass the need for Captcha forms. I’ll admit that the amount of information companies like Google can get from us from small things like this is somewhat unnerving, but I tend to side with progress over most things. The article does not go into much detail on how this is being accomplished, so unfortunately, I can’t provide any technical information here.
This article was interesting to me in a way that I don’t fully understand. I almost never see these Captcha boxes or fill in the blank forms, but hearing that they’re going away is great news to me. The disturbance to my day on the rare occasion that I do see one of these forms is pretty much nonexistent. They used to be more of a problem when trying to look at words that are nearly unreadable. I have on several occasions refreshed the Captcha three or four times, but even this was not a big issue. I think knowing that the internet is getting slightly more user friendly is what makes me so interested. Even if I get very little benefit from this, I’m glad little progresses like this are still happening somewhere. Net neutrality is back in the news. According to this article, Donald Trump’s new FCC Charmain, Ajit Pai claims that the FCC made a mistake when enforcing net neutrality and he plans to change that. Pai wants to have a “lighter touch” on internet regulation and believes this will benefit the broadband market.
Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers should not be allowed to limit data flow through their networks based on which websites or data you are trying to access. Many of the first arguments against net neutrality spoke about giving people using the internet “fast lanes” for their favorite websites, implying that they would speed up access to certain websites. More likely, the biggest websites like Google and Amazon would have about the same connection speed, but less popular websites that earn less money would have much slower connections because they are not priorities by the ISP. The ISPs are looking to profit from net neutrality not being enforced by charging companies like Google and Amazon extra money to have higher priority routing. This change would make it much more difficult for newer companies to get any user base online. While I would love to support the little guy at that point, having a significantly reduced data flow from certain websites would make them completely inferior to the larger sites that have similar features. If larger companies had the only websites that had good connection speeds, they would be able to get away with a lot that we wouldn’t put up with now. Take a website like Facebook for example. Facebook right now has an astounding amount of people using their website every day. Facebook is also not just for messaging your friends through some email-like service. Their chat service works extremely well and even has stickers and games to challenge your friends to. Facebook is being updated constantly and keeps striving for improvement. They do this to keep their customers happy and make sure the majority of people aren’t interested in looking for an alternative. If net neutrality was not in affect however, websites with a fast connection speed wouldn’t have to spend as much time improving features or fixing bugs because they know that even if their platform has some issues to be worked out, you aren’t going to leave to some painfully slow website any time soon. Even if another website has features that are better and less buggy, they’re still just too slow to use. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2017
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