E-SPEAIT T11

In my home country, Azerbaijan, online censorship is a curious thing. As my father has worked in a governmental role, sometimes I'd lean over his shoulders and read the news articles he read on the variety of local online newspapers. An alarming thing that you'd notice is that anything speaking against the government would in time be taken down. Any news or events of a riot, discontent against the ruling body, vagrant corruption, and in general anything against the government didn't last long. This mainly had to do with the majority public in Azerbaijan mostly receiving their information from mainstream television, as well as and having heavily monitored and censored radio and news publications. Censorship amongst the younger people however was quite different, while the majority of public did indeed consume censored media, that didn't mean people didn't have access to foreign world. Surprisingly, the ISP's that Azerbaijan had didn't have much influence on what you were able to do online, rather forums and discrete circles of people gather and dispense knowledge and news rather freely without bias. Censorship I believe in this case in my country is rather utilized as a form of limited propaganda which is rather truthfully rather disconcerting, but I have a hope for a better future where one would be able to figure out the truth no matter what would be shade would be covering the truth.

Speaking about censorship, privacy is also a curious thing when tech giants would rather greatly like to use your data to further their algorithms and bots. Bringing up a lawsuit against Facebook about facial recognition in Illinois worth 550$ million dollars, it would seem that the lawsuit was made with ground that Facebook had been utilizing it's photo labeling service, Tag Suggestions, face matching software that identified people in photos to be a violation of Illinois biometric privacy law by being counted as an incredibly large harvest of facial data from millions of users without their permissions and consent. It's rather dystopian in my opinion that even things like my face and fingerprints are slowly being considered data values than personal and sensitive information. Online privacy in modern day and age is becoming a sort of commodity with all you hoops you'd generally have to jump through as well as be able to utilize all the services available without halting at every point of contact. Personally I like to think of a future where our personal information can be considered as goods that we can distribute and more importantly have control over in return for benefits and services provided. It sounds rather strange, yet thinking about it rather eerily similar to what occurs currently, but without coming out and claiming what it appears to be.


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