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Online Privacy

Media (R)evolutions: How users purchase goods online differs by country

Darejani Markozashvili's picture
New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.

The 2017 CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust conducted by Ipsos (global research company), on behalf of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Internet Society reveals interesting findings on Internet security, user trust, and e-commerce behaviors.

The survey found stark differences between countries in terms of how users purchase goods online. While in China, India and Indonesia more than 86% of respondents expect to make mobile payments on their smartphone in the next year, only 30% in France, Germany and Japan expected to do so. The chart below shows the percentage of respondents likely to use mobile payments on their smartphone in the next year.
 

Source: Ipsos

Most G-8 countries mark near the bottom of this list, while emerging economies are near the top, with Indonesia leading at 55%. 

The survey also found that among those surveyed 49% said that lack of trust is the main reason they don’t shop online, suggesting that Internet users are increasingly concerned about their online privacy.

Media (R)evolutions: Media use in the Middle East

Darejani Markozashvili's picture
Also available in:  Français, العربية 

New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.
 
Digital divides are narrowing between generations and social classes within countries in the Middle East, according to a report published by the Northwestern University in Qatar in partnership with Doha Film Institute. This six-nation (Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates) survey provides a comprehensive overview of media use in the region. Here are some of the findings of the report:
  • “Cultural attitudes
    • A majority of nationals in all six countries want more entertainment media based on their culture and history, ranging from 52% of Tunisians to 80% of Qataris.
    • Use of entertainment media in Arabic is widespread, but use of English is much lower and—in some countries—declining. Only about four in 10 nationals watch films or access the internet in English. Majorities of nationals consume entertainment content from Arab countries, while consumption of film, TV, and music from the U.S. decreased since 2014.
  • Censorship and regulations
    • Three in 10 internet users worry about governments checking their online activity, a slight decline from 2013 and 2015.
    • A majority of nationals supports the freedom to express ideas online even if they are unpopular (54%).
  • Online & Social Media
    • About eight in 10 national internet users in the region use Facebook and WhatsApp, the dominant social media platforms.
    • From 2013 to 2016, internet penetration rose in all six countries surveyed, but most dramatically in Egypt, as well as Lebanon.
    • Nearly all nationals in Arab Gulf countries use the internet.

Quote of the week: Edward Snowden

Sina Odugbemi's picture

"We are living through a crisis in computer security the likes of which we’ve never seen, but until we solve the fundamental problem, which is that our policy incentivises offence to a greater degree than defence, hacks will continue unpredictably and they will have increasingly larger effects and impacts.”

- Edward Snowden, an American computer professional, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, and former contractor for the United States government who copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 without authorization. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments.

Conflict of interest: Digital privacy vs. national security

Roxanne Bauer's picture
It’s a dilemma only known in contemporary times: how to balance security and privacy.

Today, the internet is increasingly accessed through mobile devices, people are sharing more across multiple outlets, and bulk collection of data is growing. Private, personal information—Google searches, page clicks, GPS locations, and credit card swipes are all collected constantly and invisibly, often without the consumer's permission. Not only are businesses engaging in this tracking, but governments are also conducting surveillance on the basis of national security concerns. 

Governments have defended their actions by claiming that the information gathered helps fight threats to national security, both foreign and homegrown. People understand that governments need to give due weight to both privacy and national security; unfortunately, many do not receive even the most basic information regarding their country’s surveillance programs or whether their privacy is being violated.

According to Claire Connelly, “people’s right to privacy is being reduced by the day on the grounds of national security. And while it’s important to keep people safe from terror and other forms of national security threats, it’s arguable whether this should come at the cost of privacy."
 
Conflict of interest: Digital privacy vs. national security

Information is power: Silvio Waisbord on how digital technology changes the public sphere and notions of privacy

Roxanne Bauer's picture
How do digital media affect traditional theories of the “public sphere” and power? Are we living in a modern-day panopticon?

The notion of the “public sphere” is useful worldwide to consider how citizens can and do articulate demands to the market or to states. The public sphere is generally conceived as a place (figurative or literal) in which citizens can share information, debate issues and opinions, and restrain the interests of the powerful elite. This space is critical to the formation of public will and the transmission of it to official authorities.

In contrast, the Panopticon is a design for a prison or jail which allows watchmen to observe all inmates at all times without the inmates knowing whether they are being observed or not.  The idea has been used to discuss online privacy, as individuals are often unaware of how governments and companies collect and use the information they gather about them online.  Moreover, the revelation that governments and companies work together to “spy” on citizens, as revealed by Edward Snowden revived the concern that a modern-day panopticon might be possible.   

But these concepts raise another important question: How can the public sphere, which aims to limit excess power, continue to function if the state is monitoring citizen activity?  Much of the information that is collected and tracked online is willingly shared by individuals as they search the internet, use mobile apps, and contact friends and family. This activity is vital to the future of a public sphere around the world, but it also allows governments and companies to intrude in our private lives.

Silvio Waisbord explores these two evergreen, yet very immediate concerns. He argues that while digital technologies have improved the capacities of states and companies to track human activity, digital media can also be used for democratic purposes. 
 
The modern public sphere vs. The online panopticon

Media (R)evolutions: Ad blockers popular worldwide because they improve web browsing experience

Roxanne Bauer's picture

New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.

There’s a lot of discussion right now about ad blocking. As a consumer, you may think ad blocking is a protector that improves your web browsing experience, but if you run an online business you may think it’s a growing problem that reduces your revenue. What appears to be clear, however, is that the use of ad blockers is expected to grow. 

Ad blocking software blocks online advertisements before they are loaded by a user’s web browser. Once installed, the content of the page is stripped of ads before they even get the chance to load.

Ad blocking vastly improves the Web-browsing experience. The average web page is a mess of third-party analytics, plug-ins, and advertising tags, which make pages bulky and distracting.  Since ad blocking prevents those elements from loading, it speeds up page load times, reduces the amount of data consumed, and cuts back on the number of things competing for attention. There are also privacy benefits to running ad blockers. Most ad networks and tracking tools collect information about page visits and user behavior, but the ad blockers prevent third-party tracking tags from loading and following people across sites. Moreover, the display ecosystem is still the largest part of online ads and includes a mixture of video, audio and other media that seek to create more “interactive” and “engaging” ads. To enable these features, ad networks have allowed third-party JavaScript and Flash files to run in ad slots, which also allows for malicious code to be run and provides a way for viruses and malware to spread on a massive scale. 

GlobalWebIndex found, as part of their regular reporting, that regardless of  gender, age, income or the region in which they live, people are most likely to be blocking ads because they feel that too many of them are annoying or irrelevant and because they believe there are simply too many ads on the internet.

   
    

Liberals behaving badly in the public sphere

Sina Odugbemi's picture
Local politician making an appeal at demonstration against default data traffic surveillance proposed lawLiberals, as defined below, often like to shame their opponents in public debate by calling them extremists. They say this about right wing campaigners, for instance, who hold uncompromising views on gun control, or abortion, or the ruthless and prolific use of force as an instrument of power politics. Liberals also describe as extremists sundry religious fundamentalists: Hindu, Christian, Islamic, whatever variety of a religion refuses to embrace tolerance, balance, and modernity and so on. Clearly, you’d think, to be an extremist, is something that liberals really abhor. But do they really?

Before we get into the key issue that I want to raise, it is important to ask: what is liberalism? The question matters because depending on where you are in the world today to be called a ‘liberal’ could mean very different things. It is important to point out that I refer to liberalism in the context of political philosophy.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy [1]helpfully points out that:

One of the major political ideologies of the modern world, liberalism is distinguished by the importance it attaches to the civil and political rights of individuals. Liberals demand a substantial realm of personal freedom – including freedom of conscience, speech, association, occupation, and, more recently, sexuality – which the state should not intrude upon, except to protect others from harm. (p. 514)

…the basic language of liberalism – individual rights, liberty, equality of opportunity – has become the dominant language of public discourse in most modern democracies. (p. 516)

I am a conviction liberal of this kind, so what I am about to point out are the things some prominent liberals are saying in the global public sphere that make one wonder if they know what they are doing. To be blunt about it, quite a few loud, particularly doctrinaire liberals are becoming extremists too, and they seem totally unaware of this. I won’t name names, let’s just focus on the positions that they are taking.

Conflict of interest: Global internet privacy trends

Roxanne Bauer's picture
The internet, and mobile internet in particular, continue to expand across the developed and developing world – on a scale which is too large and diffuse to control. While this brings greater connectivity to large masses of people, it also has serious implications for the security and privacy of personal data.
 
Companies increasingly use cloud based services and operate across national boundaries, with servers in multiple national jurisdictions. This is because users want to be able to access their data from any device, which effectively requires data and applications to be housed on a cloud-based server. The rise of mobile devices has further exacerbated consumer demand for cloud connectivity.  Moreover, privacy laws vary significantly across different national jurisdictions; global companies often receive information in one country and then process it in a different country with a different regulatory framework. Thus, in a globalized world it becomes ever more challenging to ensure standards of privacy are upheld.
 
Concurrently, national governments seek to obtain and exploit the personal information stored on servers and personal devices for purposes of national security. At times, they compel companies to release personal data. It’s also interesting—and perhaps frightening— that open source intelligence statistical techniques are able to collect, correlate and triangulate data to identify previously anonymous information.

Claire Connelly, a journalist specialising in privacy and technology, from Sydney, Australia outlines some of the key global trends she sees unfolding around the world.
 
Conflict of interest: Global Internet Privacy Trends

Internet governance 2015: Brazil and beyond

CGCS's picture

Christian Moller explores the future of the Internet Governance Forum as the November 2015 IGF meeting in Brazil approaches.

Table flags and backboard of the 7th Internet Governance Forum2015 continues to be a decisive year for Internet governance. As in 2014 with the passage of Marco Civil and the NETmundial Meeting, Brazil is again in the focus of this year’s developments as the tenth meeting of the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will convene in João Pessoa in November. Titled “Evolution of Internet Governance: Empowering Sustainable Development,” in anticipation of this year’s IGF, human rights advocates have already begun to ask whether Brazil’s approach to internet governance might serve as a model for the rest of the world.

Brazil 2014: Marco Civil and NETmundial

In April 2014, a Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, also known as NETmundial, was hosted by the Brazilian government in São Paulo. NETmundial brought together over nine hundred attendees from governments, international organizations, the private sector, and civil society and resulted in the adoption of a (non-binding) Internet Governance Roadmap. Following the meeting, a number of pieces reviewed and commented on NETmundial’s outcome and final documents. The Center for Global Communication’s Internet Policy Observatory, for example, published Beyond NETmundial: The Roadmap for Institutional Improvements to the Global Internet Governance Ecosystem to explore how sections of “NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement” could be implemented. The meeting also played host to a series diverging narratives not only between governments, States, and civil society, but also among various civil society actors.

Five key findings on how people use social media in Qatar

CGCS's picture

A new study of internet users in Qatar has examined the usage of emerging social media networks. Damian Radcliffe explains more.

In December 2014 Qatar’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (ictQATAR) published some of the key findings from a new ground-breaking study into social media in the country.


Three discoveries in particular are of note for policy makers: 1) dramatic differences in usage by nationality; 2) the concerns of social media users; and 3) the plurality of ways in which these networks are used.

Many of these areas, such as drivers for usage, had seldom been publicly explored.

In addition to questions about older and resilient messaging applications, such as Blackberry Messenger (BBM), survey respondents were also asked about their use of emerging social channels. These applications, such as WhatsApp and Snapchat, had not previously been studied.

With fieldwork undertaken by Ipsos MENA, the Rassed team at ictQATAR,[1] the research is also remarkably current. One thousand adult internet users – fived hundred Qataris and five hundred non-Qataris – participated in fifteen-minute Computer Assisted Telephonic Interviews (CATI) between September 1 and October 16, 2014.