Privacy

In an earlier blog where I talked about Facebook, I also talked about how you have literally no privacy the moment you post something on the internet. The moment someone decides to upload something to the internet, it is immortalized forever. Until someone brings down the entire world infrastructure of the world wide web, there will be nothing you can do to get that terrible drunk video of you off of Facebook, or YouTube, or Vimeo, Buzzvideo, World Star, etc. That’s the risk of the internet. You post something, you’re giving what you posted a chance to spread like wildfire. This could happen from your friends seeing it and sharing it with their friends, or it could be that your information became compromised from someone hacking or phishing you.

There are even more worst case scenarios. Today, a security firm named Kryptowire discovered that many Chinese Android phones, such as the Nexus 6P by Huawei and any ZTE products, have a backdoor virus pre-installed on the phones. The article can be read here. All user information is sent back to a Chinese server and there is little you can do to stop it. This goes beyond what posts you make on Facebook or what you upload on Twitter. All your information is sent somewhere else for someone to peruse over before you even decide to upload it somewhere public. In this day and age of new media, where technology takes over our lives, there are exploits everywhere which basically destroys our privacy.

Advice to the College

Something that many CS majors, including myself, joke about is how CUNYFirst is a joke of a system and they wish they could improve it. Until recently, I wasn’t aware that CUNYFirst was a system that not only CUNY used, but many other private institutions used too. I watched my girlfriend use Syracuse University’s system to sign up for classes and it was identical to the CUNYFirst system we use to sign up for classes as well. So instead of just writing my own replacement for CUNYFirst, since I’ve realized the system is probably a standard that the government set, I think the best way to improve the system is to gather groups of students from all over the country to fight against this system. The idea is extremely far fetched and probably unrealistic. But maybe both students and professors who are sick of this system could join together and fight against this at a nation wide scale. This could be done through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. We could start an angry hashtag that lets us vent about the system through tweets, or start a Facebook group that could grow at an unbelievable rate.