From: The Dartmouth
Ensuring that our personal belongings are safe and secure seems to be a habitual process. We lock the doors to our dorms before going out for the night, secure our bikes to a rack before heading into class and enable a passcode on our phones before using it so often that these actions don’t seem to require a second thought or a valid reason explaining why we do them — we just do. However, how does this seemingly unconscious effort toward security translate into the things we do online? As the world is becoming increasingly connected, it is critical that we, in turn, become increasingly aware of how our information is being stored and portrayed to the online realm. From an individual to the corporate level, online privacy affects us all, so at its core, which possession should really be safeguarded more: a print article that lasts a few years or a web post that will last forever?
Since 2015, internet users have secured the privilege to have free and equal access to websites and applications without hindrances from any internet service provider, creating an “open internet.” This regulatory framework is known as net neutrality. Recently, however, the Federal Communications Commission has proposed to reverse these rules, which will possibly create a way in which ISPs, as gatekeepers, can control what we can and cannot access online. If implemented, this will especially hurt small businesses, as they simply do not have the same financial resources as larger, dominating companies do to compensate for potential cutbacks in speed and data allocation.
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