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ExpressVPN Scholarship 2016 Winning Essay
Eliza Lindley
Mount Horeb, Wisconsin
Picture yourself in 2050. How will the evolution of the internet affect our social structure and/or the authority governments have over citizens?
As I step outside for the first time in days, my eyes struggle to adjust to the glare. Activated by the sunlight, the GPS in my contacts orients itself and points me in the direction of SeCUREity’s Madison headquarters. Thanks to the incessant growth of technology and the internet, much of a middle-class urban resident’s daily life occurs online. It’s 2050 now, and I’m on my way to an in-person meeting that could shape the next few years of my life.
2045 was the year everything changed. For decades, scientists had been relentlessly working towards more interactive and collaborative technologies. Although they’d been struggling since the mid-2030s, June 13th, 2045, marked a breakthrough. A leading technology company, Eyeful, Inc., released its incredible “WorldView” internet-enabled contact lenses. These were created to project the online world into the air before a user, enabling them to navigate through the resulting holograph using their hands. Unfortunately, for the contacts to work, users had to temporarily upload their minds’ content to the internet, with the optic nerve as the lenses’ link to their brain. But because the technology had not advanced enough to support a complete upload, users would have to sync and take down their brain content every day. The necessity of this coming and going, along with the inadequacy of the existing security made established protection for the digital brains impossible, leaving them vulnerable to private agencies and individuals trying to reap information. Nevertheless, school and work could now be easily attended online and at home. With so much ease and relative convenience, contact usage quickly encompassed almost everyone’s lives.
But it didn’t take long for the government to realize that the contacts posed a huge security risk. Masquerading as a reasonable effort to safeguard citizens everywhere, the Digital Brain Activity Protection Act was passed on September 6th, 2045. Under this act, WorldView contact users would be required to install government-issued firewalls around their digital brains. Although these firewalls worked well to keep prying companies and criminals at bay, they were hiding something—a filter heavily censoring a variety of sites deemed “suspicious” by the government. This news emerged after six weeks of firewall use, and a public uproar ensued. Most people agreed that the firewalls themselves were reasonable, but undisclosed censorship was reprehensible. As a result, curious citizens were unable to do non-work-related research. Families were unable to connect with children on the other side of the world because the only permitted communication sites weren’t available in some other countries. But no matter how much picketing, protesting, and petitioning occurred, the government refused to back down.
The proceeding uproar has continued for almost five years, but an alternative has finally arisen. SeCUREity is a company dedicated to providing internet privacy, safety, and freedom all in one package. Their protective internet service acts as a flexible, filtering shield around a user’s brain as they navigate the web, keeping potentially harmful people and information out. Because it travels with the user, SeCUREity allows people to freely explore the internet without concern for their privacy and safety. It’s easily added as an implant to the WorldView contacts, where it encrypts each piece of data from a user’s brain as it uploads to the internet. With this technique, SeCUREity provides a convenient opportunity for the government to ease up on restrictions and resume protecting instead of controlling its people. That’s why I set out this morning on my way to obtain SeCUREity’s service with a hope that I, and surely many others, haven’t felt in a long while—that soon, I could be free.