Abdication of the Right to Privacy

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Abdication of the Right to Privacy

Mr. Driver
The question is 'What user rights do you feel should be part of the norms in this digital world? What user responsibilities do you feel should be expressed in this digital world?'

What does it matter what I think my rights should be?  When I enter into an online setting, I am already abdicating my right to privacy by my choice.  So are all of our students, although they don't know it.  Corporations have the right to sift through all of our online behaviors, because we grant them that right.  Students don't know this (unless they take my class)  Our learning institutions even hand over our student's privacy to Corporations without being open and clear about it.

As an experiment, we started posting in our Google Classroom for Middle School Math about My Little Pony.  Each kid started posting about how awesome My Little Pony was, and only within my school domain's Google Classroom.  Sure enough within about 20 minutes, students were receiving advertising about My Little Pony.  Especially when they went to Amazon.com.  We noticed that Amazon has an area called "Items you may like based on your search history"  That is where the MLP ads showed up, but we had not searched for them. Only talked about them in student chat on Google Classroom.  

So then the Entire ballgame about anyone using the internet these days is "Total Responsibility" and Enter at your Own Risk.  Our School requires kids to have a school email and use the Google suites of programs.  They do not say to the students that Google will be scanning their school work to try to make a profile of their behavior.  So when it comes to norms, this is now normal.  When we live our online lives, we check ourselves into a special type of prison called a panopticon.  We are always being watched.
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Re: Abdication of the Right to Privacy

Mildred Stewart
Well said & excellent teaching moment with those students!
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Re: Abdication of the Right to Privacy

Valerie Flanagan
In reply to this post by Mr. Driver
Yes, and all of your online interactions mentioned include/ are, 'for profit'. In one way or another. Students will benefit greatly, from an understanding in their role and its participation in capitalism, so they understand also- each time they have a choice in, and recognize how they use that role... or don't.