In this week’s lecture, we learned about the Ashley Madison dating website hacking scandal, then how the site works. It works by luring married men into illicit relationships with women who aren’t their wives. At first, I thought that Ashley Madison was an escort service, but after this lecture I know that that’s not the case. Although the majority of the clientele are male, the majority of the females happen to be males too, in the form of bots. This information does not surprise me at all, as the internet and the information technology sector is primarily male dominated. That’s not to say that all dating websites work this way, but for the Ashley Madison case, this is the norm.
Despite this obvious patriarchal lean, online dating apps are more popular than ever. Apps such as tinder, OK Cupid and e-harmony are all examples of successful apps that contain real women, or they can log on to CougarLife, where the name speaks for itself. All of these apps are sustaining the notion that meeting people in real life is hard, therefore creating instant access, feeding the ‘instant gratification’ society that we have become. The interesting thing I find is that although this technology is relatively new, the premise follows a very traditional ‘matchmaker‘ formula, but the physical chaperon has been replaced with the security of one’s own mobile phone.
No matter what you do on the internet, your every move and keystroke is being watched. If this does bother you, there is an alternative with the dark web, using a TOR browser. Basically the dark web is untraceable and anonymous. With this anonymity, you have to take the good with the bad. The kind of sordid material that exists out there makes the mind boggle, meaning that you need to have a pretty thick skin to absorb what’s actually happening out there. Anyone who thinks the
regular web is depraved should take a look at the dark web and be blown away by all the illegal activity that happens. The oil of the dark web machine is the Bitcoin, untraceable digital money that can be used to purchase goods and services online, and now in real life, as I witnessed on my last visit to Las Vegas. Select hotels are now accepting bitcoin as payment for rooms.
With our assignment due next week, Our group organised a meeting right after the lecture to discuss options for our presentation. The meeting was very successful and we both decided on a style and storyline. We originally wanted to incorporate both the split-screen and choose your adventure styles required for the video, but after meeting and beginning the filming process, we decided that we would have enough footage to just use the split screen effect. The editing involved to execute both techniques would have been far too time consuming for the time constraints placed on us. We were a bit ambitious to think that we could achieve both effects in the allocated time, but I believe that now we are on track, we’re looking at getting everything done and polished before the due date, which is super wishful thinking, but we can dream, can’t we?
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2 thoughts on “The internet privacy paradox”