The Data Dilemma – Do We Care What the Sites We Use Know About Us?

Horizon – May 2018

In March, the world was shocked by reports that Cambridge Analytica, a data collection firm that worked closely with the Trump campaign, had collected the data of millions of American Facebook users in the build up to the 2016 presidential election. While I could write about how invasive and deplorable this tactic was, and how Facebook’s response was laughable, instead I want to talk about what part of this issue stems from – how we treat our data.

I signed up for a run tracking app a few years ago, using it about twice before falling back into my sedentary habits. The app had asked for my age, weight, height, address, and connected me with other (admittedly more active) friends. It turns out that at the beginning of this year the app underwent a hack, with millions of users having their account details stolen. Luckily, I hadn’t tied my account to any form of payment method, but there now could be someone who knows that there is a Ben Haward who lives at my address, is my size, and has my friends.

This is just one example of many things I’ve registered for online, dropping my personal information likes it’s a scavenger hunt to the holy grail of identity theft.

My data isn’t only visible to predatory hackers, however. I went to Instagram, the social network that I tend to use most frequently. I’ll look at my profile daily, but I’ve never really thought about the information I present on it. Surveying it more closely, I was struck by what a few pictures, captions, and followings said about me. Anyone could clearly tell where I lived, where I go to school, what university I’m attending, and what interests me. Looking at the people I follow, they’d know that I’m a big Beatles fan, a soccer nut, and, topically, where I stand politically.

Personal data is no longer just a commodity to defrauders, but also to almost every major corporation. You probably know this though if you’ve seen advertisements for the pair of shoes you like, or maybe the bulk pack of Tide pods you were deliberating on. Every time you use the internet companies like Google, Amazon, and of course, Facebook are collecting data and using it to target advertisements to you. This practice is the main source of revenue for these companies, with Facebook making an estimated $40 billion in 2017 from companies that advertise on their site. To add to this several startups like Datacoup and MoviePass have emerged in recent years, allowing users to essentially prostitute their privacy to receive benefits. These companies have been bombarded by claims that they violate their user’s privacy, and Mitch Lowe, the CEO of MoviePass, actively reinforced these claims, saying at a Hollywood event that “we know all about you.”

So, will all this change the way I use the internet? Truthfully, I doubt it.

It’s not that I don’t care about my data, but as much as I want to protect it, my desire to use the internet and social media with few restrictions always seems to supersede my privacy.

My attitude towards the internet is shared among Wyoming students too. In talking to my peers, the overwhelming majority say that the protection of their data is not the first thing that crosses their mind as they use the internet. When asked if she believed that the way she uses the internet leaves her susceptible to data collection and exploitation, senior Sarah Sheerajin said, “It’s just not really something I think about.”

As much as I can say that myself and those in my generation are apathetic about the whole thing, it doesn’t detract from just how big an issue data collection is – and is becoming.

There is no simple solution to the problem, however. The web is becoming intertwined with the collection of personal data, and no ‘improved privacy policy’ can untangle it. It will take a massive readjustment in the way we use the internet to combat an industry that is growing at a rapid rate.

Inaction on Guns Leaves Students at Risk – and Afraid

Horizon – March 2018

“26 killed in school shooting. 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 among the dead” the CNN headline reads on the TV in the hotel lobby. My sister sits across from me, drawing in her sketchbook, 7 years old.

It was December 14th, 2012, the day that Adam Lanza, after killing his mother, drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School and committed the deadliest school shooting in American history. I had lived in the United States for 5 months, after moving from the U.K. in the previous summer. In the 12 years prior to that day, I had never been exposed to the level of fear I felt reading that headline. Suddenly I had to worry not only about my pre-algebra homework and what dinner would be when I came home from school, but also the fact that any day someone could enter my school, or even my sister’s school, with a semi-automatic weapon. Before that day, guns had only been a fixture of pretending on the playground, the romanticized action movie, or the Playstation, and now I was plunged into a world in which they could be used to murder children.

So why was this never a concern for me before? Since I was born in 2000, there has been just one mass-shooting (at least four fatalities) in the U.K., and no school shootings. In the U.S. there have been 32 mass-shootings since 2000, claiming 392 lives, alongside 210 school shootings. The most commonly cited reason for this difference? The U.K. has some of the strictest gun laws in the world.

The U.K.’s relationship with firearms has not always been this way, however. On March 13th, 1996, a gunman entered a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and killed 16 children, ages 5 to 6, using multiple handguns. The shooting remains the deadliest mass-shooting in the U.K.’s history.

The perpetrator of the shooting, Thomas Hamilton, had been a local scoutmaster, but locals of Dunblane described him as “an oddball – a loner obsessed with guns and young boys” who had been reported to the authorities on several occasions for his behavior.  Given this, people were outraged to discover that Hamilton legally owned the firearms used in the shooting.

A year and a half after the Dunblane massacre, the British parliament passed the Firearms Act 1997, banning the private ownership of handguns; building upon the Firearms Act 1988 which banned the private ownership of semi-automatic and pump-action weapons.

This presents a contrast with the consistent inaction of the U.S. Congress in the aftermath of mass shootings, but it is not without its nuances. Prior to Dunblane, the U.K. had never really had a “gun culture” like the United States, and there is no constitutionally enshrined principle right of the people to “keep and bear arms”. As a result, firearm ownership in the U.K. has always been much lower than that of the U.S., and the implementation of gun control was met with considerably less backlash.

The fact is, however, that gun control does work and has in various countries. Japan, a nation with arguably the strictest firearms policy in the world, has the lowest rate of firearm deaths. After a mass-shooting killing 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia implemented stricter gun registration laws, banned certain firearms, implemented a buy-back policy for firearms, and since then has seen its firearm homicide rate plummet.

America might not be ready, or may not want that level of change, but there is no doubt that change is wanted. An SSRS poll in late February 2018 reported that 64% of Americans believed that stricter gun control would be an effective measure in preventing mass shootings. On March 14th, thousands of students, including our own, walked out of class in solidarity with those killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and demanding action to prevent these events from happening. On March 24th students from this school will lead the ‘March For Our Lives’ in Washington D.C., which is set to be one of the largest marches in U.S. history.  

So why hasn’t anything been done? You could point to squabbles between Democrats and Republicans, adherence to the second amendment, or the existence of a ‘gun culture’, and you’d be right. But there is a reason that cannot be ignored – the interests of gun owners and the gun industry, represented by groups like the National Rifle Association. These groups donate millions of dollars to political campaigns in order to protect their interests, and while gun manufacturers are prohibited from donating to political action funds affiliated with these groups, they pour millions into supporting their media campaigns, educational courses, and other programs to spread a pro-gun message. These donations work in turn to boost gun sales and drive the revenue of the manufacturers. The power that the ‘gun lobby’ has in politics has been misconstrued from one that protects individual liberties, to one that is a profit driven scheme that neglects the evidence that their industry facilitates the deaths of thousands of people each year.  

I write this article in the aftermath of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which saw the deaths of 17 students and staff members. I’m not the first to ask those in power to imagine if those students,whose lives were stripped from them just as they were about to return home to their families, were their children.

It is our duty to those who died in Parkland, and the hundreds of other students who have been the victims of school shootings, to take action so we can truly say “Never Again”.

From Twitter to Congress, Both Sides are to Blame for Turmoil

Horizon – January 2018

Another day, another so-called ‘revelation’ about President Donald Trump. From his inflammatory tweeting to his constant jibes at the ‘fake-news complex’, he provides endless drivel for those same news organizations to inflate and broadcast – and we, the left wing, gobble it up, and even further augment it.

We assume that Trump is a puppet of the Russian government, a grown man with the mental capacity of a toddler, or a billionaire funneling half of the federal reserve into the already fat pockets of his billionaire-buddies. It’s these assumptions that serve as a blatant example of hypocrisy. Did extreme opponents of Obama not make similar assumptions? They assumed he was a power-hungry authoritarian dead set on taking away their guns, or even an illegitimate president based on his ancestry. These assumptions, stretched to the point of tearing, infuriated liberals through Obama’s time in office, just as these new assumptions about Trump and those who surround him have many conservatives up in arms.

Every trickle of new knowledge that emerges about the president would seem like the biggest scandal since Watergate if you explored liberal social media. It is crucial to be able to mock the president’s actions and words, and holding him at fault is a cornerstone of democracy, but distorting evidence to come to extreme conclusions is dangerous and self-defeating. I don’t intend to defend the president, and I think we should all be able to agree that clear expressions of xenophobia and sexism are inexcusable, but to demonize him and his party is a surefire way to close any possibility of having civil political discussions.

Politics needs to return to a state in which policy takes precedence over character. In 2017 it was reported that 11.7% of Americans were without health insurance, 6.1% live in ‘deep poverty’, 14% were illiterate, and 4.88 of every 100,000 would die as a result of intentional homicide. None of these are polarizing issues. It should be the responsibility of a truly democratic government to address these problems, liberal, conservative or otherwise inclined. It is the means by which issues that are addressed that should be questioned, not the legitimacy of the issue itself. It is doubtful that Donald Trump’s administration is going to steer the United States towards this, but while personal attacks and exaggeration run rampant in the political system and the media realising a more effective democracy will be much more difficult.

This trend is grossly evident in this months government shutdown. While thousands of government employees were told to stay home, and thousands of citizens denied entry to national parks, immigration services, and other institutions, politicians on both sides turned towards a childish blame game, from the senate floor to the twitter feed. In truth the shutdown is the cause of both sides’ inability to compromise, or even just have a constructive debate.

Arnold King presents the ideas of the progressivism, conservatism, and libertarianism being foreign languages in his book “The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across Political Divides”. Speakers of each will tend to “talk past” each other as it is easier to accept your own view then to understand the rationale of others. King urges readers to attempt to listen rather than dismiss.

It is this ability that many have lost in the current political climate, and the uproar that follows every movement of the president is symptomatic of that. If improving the country is what we want, then we also have to recognize that people are going to disagree on how to achieve that. Having a different economic or political philosophy isn’t ignorant, dangerous, or evil – holding prejudice is.

Keep fighting against what you believe is wrong. Don’t settle for what you believe to be unjust. Be informed and hold opinions, but be ready to listen, not just talk.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Continues to Ignore Humanitarian Crisis

Horizon – November 2017

In 1991 she won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2017 Aung San Suu Kyi, de facto leader of Myanmar, fails to recognize one of the greatest humanitarian crises in recent history unfolding on the Western coast of her nation.

Myanmar is a nation of over 50 million people sandwiched to the west by India and Bangladesh, and to the east by China, Laos, and Thailand. The majority of its population is comprised of ethnic groups traditionally following Buddhism, but in the Rakhine State on the West Coast of the country there is a minority of The Rohingya people, an ethnic group comprised mainly of Muslims. Since 1982, The Rohingya People have been denied citizenship in Myanmar, and are excluded from government records detailing ethnic composition, despite there being an estimated 800,000 Rohingyas in the nation. With that, The Rohingya People are also prohibited from owning land, travelling without government permission, and having more than two children. These policies have lead to The Rohingya people being called “the world’s most persecuted minority” by The United Nations.

So why does this discrimination occur? Myanmar, known as Burma until 1989, was a British colony from 1824 to 1948. Under British rule the population of Muslims in the nation tripled, generally coming from Eastern Bangladesh. The Muslim and Buddhist groups in Myanmar have generally always operated in separate spheres. In World War II the Rohingya Muslim population of Myanmar sided with the British, while most Buddhists sided with Japan. After winning the war, British officials awarded Rohingya citizens with government posts, land, and other benefits. In 1948 Myanmar gained independence from Britain, and conflict erupted between the Buddhist majority and Rohingya minority.

Since then, Rohingyas have been persecuted by a military controlled government, but in 2015, as the National League for Democracy (NLD) won the national election, they may have felt things would change. The NLD is a party lead by global symbol of democracy and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. In 1990 the party won the national election, but with the military unwilling to hand over power to the party, Suu Kyi was put under house arrest and the government remained unchanged. In 1991 Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work towards contesting the oppressive and undemocratic regime of Myanmar.

2015 marked the first openly contested election in Myanmar since 1990, and the first full election since Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest in 2010. The NLD won a super-majority, and the military backed Union Solidarity and Development Party handed power over. This marked the first time since the military coup of 1962 that the military would not be in control of the nation’s government. Suu Kyi became the State Counsellor, as Myanmar’s constitution prohibited her from being President given that her spouse is not a Burmese national. It is widely accepted however that she is the leader of Myanmar.

Fast forward to 2017, and Suu Kyi and the NLD remain in power, amid unprecedented levels of discrimination of The Rohingya People. Since the beginning of this year it is estimated that over 400,000 Rohingyas have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, as military and civilians have clashed with Rohingyan communities, causing massive destruction and displacement. To aggravate the issue, Rohingyas are continued to be denied citizenship in Myanmar, and are denied legal protection within the state. This also means that their access to healthcare, education and employment is extremely limited, and consequently they experience low life expectancies, literacy rates, and quality of life.

The most alarming developments however is the military’s part in the current crisis. According to Human Rights Watch Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh reported that government forces had conducted armed raids of Rohingya communities, burning homes, and brutalizing civilians. Amnesty International also reported that landmines had been used by these forces in areas highly populated by Rohingya. The military has attempted to justify the raids as “counter-terrorism operations” following an attack by Islamic militants on a border post last year, but it is clear from satellite imagery of Rohingya settlements taken by Human Rights Watch that these raids are not tactical, and result in the effective ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.

So how has Suu Kyi responded to this? Surely a Nobel Laureate and supposed advocate of tolerance and human rights would lament ethnic cleansing within her own nation? Since becoming State Counsellor, she has overseen the limitation of access to Western Myanmar by humanitarian organizations and journalists in an attempt to hide the atrocities being committed in the region. In a speech to Myanmar’s parliament she denied any armed clashes occurring. Then, in September she cancelled a visit to the United Nations in New York in which she was meant to address the General Assembly. After an earlier BBC interview in which she was quoted as saying, “No-one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim.”, Suu Kyi stated in a 2017 interview that she wanted to find out why more than 400,000 Rohingyas are fleeing the country. If she wanted to find out why, she should ask the hundreds of soldiers in her country who have destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of Rohingyas, or perhaps she could make an attempt to open a dialogue with Rohingya leaders, instead of dehumanizing them.

Living in Cincinnati we have a connection to Aung San Suu Kyi, or at least her image. In Northside you will find a mural by renowned street artist Shepard Fairey depicting the leader of Myanmar, next to a hand showing the ‘peace sign’. At the moment, Suu Kyi’s likeness could not stand any further from representing peace, and the crisis that is currently unfolding in Myanmar subverts Suu Kyi’s reputation as an inspiring figure to one that is willing to sacrifice principle, morals, and decency to attain political power.