After watching the first part of the Frontline documentary, I ended up watching the second one as well about corporate data gathering and I thought that was more interesting as something that personally affects my behavior. It is no secret that many technology companies are profiting greatly on keeping profiles of their customers and using mass data collection to target automated ads at specific customers, with Google and Facebook as some of the most effective at doing this. What really surprised me in the documentary was how little resistance there was for these policies to become so widespread, with the most relevant example being Gmail. In 2006, A California Senator met with Larry Page and Sergey Brin about possible legislation to prevent Gmail from automatically reading the emails of its customers in order to target ads at them. The Senator was ultimately convinced to drop her proposal, something especially surprising given just how strict laws on reading another person's physical mail are, and what was once a controversial issue about invasions of privacy has become industry standard and any company with the capability is gathering as much information about its customers as possible. And as the first part of the Frontline documentary illustrated, much of that information is (or at least was before the leaks) also accessible by the NSA.
Without trying to sound too paranoid about the whole situation (if I haven't already sounded paranoid), one of the things I personally have started doing as a result of these data collection and advertising policies is typically open YouTube videos in private windows. This means that when I open it, it is in a browser instance that does not save any of my log in information, and won't be tracked as a video that I have watched on my Google account. I tend to be someone who will open almost any YouTube link I see, usually without having any idea of what I'm going to see. Naturally some of these videos are political in nature and I may watch or not watch and agree or not agree with whatever is in it. Once I noticed that Google was placing certain kinds of political videos in my "related videos" on the side when it was something totally unrelated to what I was watching, it made me a little uneasy. Again, I don't want to sound too paranoid about it and I realize this was all done automatically and there was nothing harmful coming out of any of this, it just made me a little uncomfortable I wanted to avoid it in the future. I don't really know of anyone else who has gone even as far as this so from what I can tell it doesn't bother most people so maybe I am crazy.
Part 2 of the documentary:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-secrets/#video-2
I found this second part even more disturbing. I should probably show this to students so they know. I also think that Microsoft is suing to prevent the government from accessing customer data because their reputations were so severely damaged after it was revealed what they allowed the government to do -- even if they knew it was wrong. Suing the government back then was probably seen as political suicide. Still... if Snowden didn't reveal this, would they still be doing it? Probably. Like, who would know?
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