Collaborative Review: “The Challenge of Privacy” by tneast

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I’ve chosen to review The Challenge of Privacy, the ninth post by my tneast. I’m using their handle instead of their name for privacy reasons, which seems appropriate given the Week 11 topic focused on by the post.

I’ll break down the blog according to the suggested collaborative review components, then give some of my general thoughts at the end.

Screenshot of The Challenge of Privacy, showing the first paragraph and an image of tneast’s inbox; via northeast.opened.ca

Accuracy

I think the post is perfectly accurate in all of its claims. My only caveat here is that in some cases, this is because the claims are quite general: I would have liked to see a little more data. For example, the post could cite studies regarding the pace of privacy erosion, what information is being scraped, or the difficulty of anonymizing data. I’ll provide a couple of options in the “Suggested Resources” section below.

Clarity

This was my favorite aspect of the post! It does a great job of communicating thoughts, values, and suggestions. I think the attached image does a lot of heavy lifting: it’s personal to tneast, relateable to the reader, and relevant to the post’s subject. I never would have thought to use my own inbox as an example, and it works very well.

Critical Thinking

I liked the focus on the need for systemic change: this is not a problem that a free market of profit-motivated entities (and convenience-motivated users) is good at handling. I focused on this issue in my own privacy post and my section of our group project, so I’m clearly a little biased! But I think tneast addressed it well, leading naturally into their use of the Online News Act source.

Suggested Resources

As I mentioned above, here are some additional sources which could be cited and integrated into the points already being made by the post:

  1. The pace and nature of privacy erosion on the internet
  2. What kind of personal information is being scraped
  3. The difficulty of keeping your data anonymous

Final Thoughts

I found this post succinct and readable, and I think it makes a meaningful contribution to our discussion regarding privacy. It doesn’t hurt that I agree with its claims, and where it points the emphasis going forward. That was a strong note to end “The Challenge of Privacy” on, and so I’ll end mine there as well!

2 Comments

  1. Thanks so much for highlight. I really appreciated reading your thoughts and I’m glad it resonated so much with you. I’ll also add that you are correct that I over-generalized a bit. This is admittedly a bad habit in my writing, especially when I am pressed for time and its a good catch on your part. I hope it didn’t take away too much from the overall read

    1. You’re welcome, and not at all! I think what’s already there is great, and anything else is just a suggestion for how the post could be expanded further.

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