Blog Post#5 Privacy

 

The Importance of Privacy

Although I knew that online privacy was an issue, I didn't realize the extent of it until I watched these TED Talks. It is hard to quantify how these issues might affect me, my friends, and my family because they literally affect everyone on the planet. We already know that Google doesn't forget, and all of our pictures and posts on social media will probably be there forever, but what we might not release is the problem with facial recognition software. I was shocked to hear that face.com has a database of 18 billion faces online. The idea that people can find out your name, where you live, and where you work just by seeing your picture online is unbelievable. 

Even if we are cautious on our social media, it is still too easy for people to track us down. In the second TED talk, we learned that not only do the police have military-grade weapons, but they have military-grade surveillance as well. Using automatic license plate readers, they can track where you go and even who you are with, so they can also access cell tower data to reveal people's locations, which is a huge civil liberty threat now that data can be stored in the cloud, there are no limits to how much information they keep and for how long. 

In the third TED talk, we learned about wiretapping and how companies build surveillance into our networks, which means that someone from our government or another government can be listening to our calls or reading our texts. The government claims that they need to be able to do this to fight terrorism, but most people are not terrorists, and this again poses a civil liberties threat to innocent people being surveilled. Finally, we heard about cyber harassment, also known as revenge porn which is when your personal photos are shared online without your consent. While some people may think this does not apply to them with our advanced photo editing technology, anyone can be put in a compromising position even if they never sent a personal photo out. The scariest part of this situation is there are very few laws to protect people, and it can take up to a year to get these photos taken down.

The government needs to create laws to protect us online. The internet is international, so it makes it hard, but stricter penalties will serve as a deterrent, at least. Unfortunately, the government approves of some of these surveillance techniques and fights against legislation that would protect us from them. so what can we do to protect ourselves? The speaker in the first TED talk did give some good advice. Even though we already know these things, we definitely need to be reminded to be careful what we post to remember the purpose of what we are posting, and not fall in love with ourselves and not post too much information. Second, we definitely need to be using the encryption features available to us. Encryption is the default on many of our Apple devices, as well as FaceTime and WhatsApp, but we need to check what protections we have available to us and enable them immediately.