Online Censorship and Privacy (week 11)

 While some countries provide freedom in accessing the content on the internet, there are also some countries restricting it. Iceland, Estonia, Canada, and Germany are the leading countries on free internet. But, countries like Cuba, Myanmar, Iran, and Chine are mostly limiting internet freedom. Now, it is time to take a look at the policies of one of the restricted-internet countries - Saudi Arabia.

   According to the data provided by The Guardian, Saudi Arabia is the leading country among the Arabian countries for Internet Censorship. The censored websites mostly involve pornographic and political content. All this censorship is done by an Internet Service located in King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology which is in the capital, Riyadh. There are 2 main ways that censorship is executed; immoral and the one directed by a security committee. The immoral ones are mostly about pornographic content and the citizens are motivated to report such websites to be blocked. Indeed, for the above-mentioned reason, there are hundreds of requests made each day. A student named Madawi Al-Rasheed studying in London has said that her own website has also been blocked in her homeland. She adds, "But it is quite easy to circumvent using proxy servers. The idea is to protect society, but the so-called immoral sites are the most accessed, much more than radical or jihadi ones."

   Now, let's take a closer look at the interesting privacy cases. I would like to emphasize one of my favorite examples - Biometrics. We know that Biometric Security is currently used by most people today. There are some forms of Biometrics like; Fingerprints, Iris, and Face IDs. They are convenient, fast, and have the potential to become quite vulnerable. What would happen if the servers containing our biometric data were subjected to an attack and data leaked out? Our most vulnerable data would be theft and surf on the internet. This is totally unacceptable. So that such data in most cases is preserved in the gadget itself and it is too hard to steal it. But, on 5 August 2019, there has been explored that a Biometric data breach had occurred. It was named as BioStar 2 and caused 1 million people's data breach having a total of 28 million records. Fingerprints, Facial IDs, unencrypted usernames, and passwords are some kinds of data stolen. According to the Security Researchers, the company preserving these data has not been protected and anyone could have stolen it.

REFERENCE:

1. Saudia Arabia leads Arab regimes in internet censorship. (2022). Retrieved 7 April 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/30/internet-censorship-arab-regimes

2. Freedom House Index: internet freedom in selected countries 2021 | Statista. (2022). Retrieved 7 April 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/272533/degree-of-internet-freedom-in-selected-countries/

3. Biometric data breach: Database exposes fingerprints and facial recognition data of 1 million people. (2022). Retrieved 7 April 2022, from https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-emerging-threats-biometric-data-breach-database-exposes-fingerprints-and-facial-recognition-data.html

4. [image source] User Privacy or Cyber Sovereignty?. (2022). Retrieved 7 April 2022, from https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/user-privacy-or-cyber-sovereignty