People are oblivious towards online privacy

Any idea of a digital world where society can still have the right to privacy might as well be abandoned. Many internet users simply do not have any interest in protecting their privacy and will continue to use platforms regardless of the website’s stance on data privacy. With these current attitudes, online privacy is certainly a lost cause. Very few people read privacy policies before joining a platform like Facebook or Google (despite both receiving a great degree of media criticism for data breaches). The privacy policies constitute thousands of words of legalese, a construction which requires a law degree to parse and begin to understand. A report by Pew research determined that half of Americans do not recognise that privacy policies are a binding contract between websites and their users. The report also polled 4,727 US adults with a straightforward, 10 question test. It checked for basic knowledge about phishing, online advertising and cookies. Only 20% of people answered 7 out of 10 questions correctly, and only 2% of people got all 10 questions right. The least understood question, however, was about protecting online privacy from hackers; 55% of people could not identify an example of two-factor authentication.^[1] Therefore, with online user’s oblivious attitudes towards internet privacy, society should accept the fact that protection of our personal data should be abandoned, if people are not willing to change their attitudes, it is a lost cause.

[P1] Online users are completely oblivious to the dangers of not having privacy online. [P2] Therefore, online privacy might as well be abandoned if online users are not invested enough to do anything about it.