Online censorship and privacy

Online censorship is currently might be one of the most important issues currently, if this was an actual conversation someone might have brought up climate change, a war in some place, and any number of any problems that currently plague the world, but if we took the time we would almost certainly be able to trace at least a portion of the momentum against- or pro- movement to misinformation, which may or may not have been spread intentionally by someone. 

And a discussion about that almost always leads to a discussion about online censorship, how it may help with the issue or maybe how it could work against it, basically everyone has their own opinion about it, and to prove that one is opinion is more correct then another is almost impossible, unless those polices actually get implemented and tested in the real world. 

Now this leads me to the recent developments that happened before and around the pandemic that it easily overshadowed, and with good reason at that, but this issue is still important and need to be not forgotten, as according to some websites the effects of it should start to only be felt in the year 2021. What I’m talking about is the EUs Article 13, an article that would expand legal liability for websites, meaning that if some user posted something that they didn’t own on to someones website, then the website would be held accountable for it! 

Most people when they hear that might think, that will stop pirates from stealing and sharing content illegally or at the very least make it more difficult, and maybe that is true, but that article also brings in an unintended effect with it, making memes basically illegal! Now it isn’t actually making memes illegal on paper, but it would force websites to filter everything that is uploaded on to them via some algorithm, and a lot of people fear that an algorithm will have trouble differentiating between a meme and an illegal picture of an artwork, or something in that vain.


Now it is important to know that privacy and censorship is deeply intertwined, at first glance you might think that, “Yes those concepts are in a similar area but how do they connect?”, well how would someone be able to censorship everything perfectly, the only way is if they scan everything that is uploaded, even the private content, so unless the person who is censoring a subject decides that he doesn’t want to perfectly censors it, then everything has to be scanned and compared against some central database of all the forbidden “stuff”. And the transfer of data, back and forth would leave it even more vulnerable to hacking and leaks. 

Not a direct example, as we don’t currently have a system like that to show some real faults with, but we can use the recent Ring camera incident for that. The Ring cameras function in such a way that all the footage is constantly being sent to a central location where that data is stored until the user wants to delete it, but one of the workers who managed the databases and the servers liked to secretly watch people go about their business via his access to all that data. In that example it wasn’t that bad, as the person only used it for their own amusement, but what if he had sold the data there, then somebody could have potentially owned a copy of a recording of you daily life, leaving you with no privacy.

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