Academic

PREVENTING A PRIVACY DYSTOPIA: PROTECTING CANADIANS IN AN ONLINE CONTEXT

Excerpt:

Questions concerning privacy, surveillance and large-scale data acquisition are highly relevant in light of the rapid technologizing of daily life. Canada’s policy as outlined in The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) maintains that private carriers (such as Bell, Rogers, Telus, & Shaw) have a responsibility to remain transparent in their data acquisition techniques and uses. However, apprehensions arise as to the efficacy of the government to hold corporations accountable for their violations, if not other methods of misdirection. Therefore, regarding Canadian Internet service providers (ISPs), the legislative mechanisms in place for the protection of data and privacy (i.e. PIPEDA) are ineffectual because they do not reinforce a clear standard of transparency from the carriers themselves, and largely place the onus of managing privacy on the individual. The potential implications of ineffective policy lie not only in the likelihood of corporations operating in violation of Canadian law, but furthermore situate the condition of Canadian citizens and their personal information as vulnerable to exploitation. Furthermore, in an era of big data, PIPEDA does not contain adequate measures in order to address such unprecedented mass-accumulation, nor does it acknowledge the deeply concerning residual risks involved in anonymization, or aggregatization of data into its legally monetized form. Certainly, Internet usage is becoming increasingly inextricable from modern Canadian existence, and arguably there is nothing inherently adverse in gathering and storing data on user engagement, as much of this technology is being used for productive purposes. However the lack of transparency as to the ways in which this information is being used/sold by carriers, whom of which function with a market agenda, is troubling. If indeed the Canadian government remains in negligence of modernizing as well as ensuring compliance to PIPEDA, they remain complicit in latent unethical handlings of said data and therefore contribute to a detrimental state of online identity protection.

WE, THE CYBORG: MEDIATED NARRATIVES SURROUNDING BIOHACKING

Excerpt:

Biohacking is the emerging technological practice of invasive human augmentation with the intention to enhance human capability beyond the limits of biology, thereby coalescing human and machine into a “cyborg” (Haraway, 2000, pg. 291). The mediated narratives surrounding biohacking discuss the phenomenon as the blurring of the line that denotes human from machine; whereas humans have typically made use of various technologies, these media explore how they have become a part of us. The implications of the “cyborgification” (Haraway, 2000, pg. 292) of the human by way of biohacking is an area of contention particular to the contemporary societal discourse. Media surrounding biohacking express a spectrum of values and anxieties towards the technology, all of which contend with the ethics of augmenting what is natural, or biological. What becomes apparent is that these varied sentiments have much more to do with internalized value sets rather than the technology itself. As Turkle (2004) writes, “technology serves as a screen that enables people to project their thoughts and feelings” (pg. 29). These articles altogether ask “how do we codify, classify, and ratify what actually makes us human” (Anthony, 2016). Therefore the mediated narratives surrounding biohacking divulge a collective wrangling with the ambiguous definition of the human condition in light of a shocking practice, and do so by way of the following valuations; the physicality of the human, the internal presence of consciousness, and the evolutionary trajectory of the human. Ultimately, the mediated discourse attempt to mitigate the anxiety, the most palpable being a feeling of the “uncanny” (Sconce, 2000, pg. 133), borne out of this ambiguity, and do so by familiarizing the essence of biohacking ideology as central to the human condition.