Anil Dash What Is Public Summary

Anil Dash stresses the idea that the implications of the fuzzy line between private and public not strictly defined can lead to greater loss of privacy, through his article “What is Public?” Anil Dash begins his article with numerous considerations of instances that are under normal circumstances thought to be private, transformed into public information more vulnerable to exploitation. The grey area caused by no definite divide between public and private information leaves a lot of room for elasticity in ways for companies to use this to their advantage. The influence by the media and technology industries being keenly interested in thriving off indistinct boundaries lead to their own determination of what will become public.
The media industry benefits from using public information as a means for fresh material and content. The technology industry are more interested in making the most revenue through changing what was once private information in public, and they also advertise in the same sense as media, using public information for means to make money. Policy makers with the power to clarify what is public allow these two industries to continue to prosper on the vague privacy lines. Standards set in the era before the internet have great significance of how behind the times laws on how to handle privacy are. The regulation of how the media and
technology business uses the information that was once private is sparse. Anil Dash gives a way that public standards can move for the better, through policy makers fighting back against the two resilient industries, but at a cost of money and effort. Dash on the other hand thinks that policy has settled for enablement, leaving the true definition to remain legalistically not up for the internet age.
Social media plays a huge role in defining public, and what you post on the internet no matter what site is free game. Even if the original contributor has not given consent, with helpful tools that make it easier to repost what someone else has made, the message can spiral into something larger than the first person’s intent. That might in turn reveal information about that person. Doxxing is a term for when people harass someone through sharing personal information about someone else on the internet. This brings into attention that ethics and morals are the conscience of defining the grey area of information. Technology has control on privacy through its usage of database storage. It is cheaper for a company to store less information privately allowing the whole world to view it than it to shield user information from the world. They use an on and off system of binary codes to make it simpler than users choosing who they want to see their information. Facebook is a company employing these tactics, defining what is public without the choice of the users, by publicizing more information.
Another way technology uses formally private actions turned public is the use of digital systems that allow for location and time capture from photos taken on smartphones.
This allows for information about the place and time they have taken the photo to display publically for all to see. Anil Dash goes on to explain that he is a cofounder of a company that gathers user data from those who use their product. He states that what they release of user statistics correlates to the return of previous users and the growth of new users. This data is important to how many records they choose to withhold from their
shareholders.
Policy makers have believed that the claims for public and private lines are overall concise and undisputed, leading to the lack of change to seek change. This is a huge profit factor for the industries to gain, the old ways of the laws on privacy lead to the expansion of state power. The tech companies recording all user information make monitoring easy. We allow this in our culture to have surveillance as an acceptable action.
There are many ways words can be used in social media against others. A lot of them are used to shame or are destructive in nature to life but not specifically illegal, due to the reliance on the current definition of public. Things like social agreements are used to justify how we use information on the internet. Anil Dash strongly states that in order to protect the public interest of all, we have to understand the meaning of public.