Blog Post #8 Assignment

Write a regular post about issues raised in the videos you watched.

• How do these issues affect you? You friends and family?

• What should the government be doing about these issues?

• What can we do to protect ourselves from invasions of our privacy?

 

It is no secret that the amount of surveillance throughout the United States have increased, our overall privacy has decreased, and that the internet and social media is not helping us. Our phones alone can track our location in real time, as well as record our surroundings and record audio. The apps on our phones can track our preferences, opinions, and ideas, and let those be shared with anyone on the internet. But even without phones, there are also cameras everywhere. Sure, they have been proven helpful when it comes down to finding evidence for a crime, or to know someone's whereabouts during a crime, but they can also be used to track people, scan licence plates or, if the person behind the camera is malicious, personal information like credit card numbers, things that you do not want anyone to really see In this modern age, filled with technology, the information put out there is permanent, and has a way to be seen by everyone.

     All of this, without a doubt, affects everyone, even people who do not own any social media or a phone. Nowadays, there are very few places one can go without being tracked in any way. Though, some are able to find ways, intentional or not, to not be tracked as much as others. I will use myself for an example. While I do have and post messages and videos on apps like YouTube and Discord, I do not have any apps that are more focused on posting messages or videos about or of yourself. YouTube has a wide variety of videos that can be posted, with my most common one being of gaming. You do not need to post your face or surroundings- or even your voice, to do this. All that can really be obtained is your interests or what games you have played in the past. For Discord, I mainly just talk to friends and people who I met online. To this day, I have not given any information about myself besides things they could have found out on their own, like my timezone. I have not revealed my face or name to anyone on either of these sites.

    I cannot speak much for my friends- I know some have Instagram or Snapchat, but I've never visited their accounts/pages, though I know my family use social media. My parents both use facebook (though have become less and less active on it throughout the past few years), and my sister uses TikTok (and used to post content on there). Their faces have definitely been put out there, and through my parents' accounts mine is out there as well.

    While it would be in our best interest for the government and police to limit the amount of privacy that can been breached, but that is likely never going to happen. This is because it would make things much harder for them. With how powerful surveillance is nowadays, it is much more difficult to get away with a crime, with the existence of security cameras, us being able to do fingerprint and DNA tests, and countless other ways of us tracking and stopping criminals. However, all of this data is also being tracked for people with no criminal record. While it is possible for anyone to commit a crime, and having information on them already can be helpful, I do not believe that this amount of breach in privacy is necessary.

 

    While there is not much we can do to protect ourselves from the equipment of the government, we can try and prevent information that we create or share from entering the wrong hands. For one, we can turn on airplane mode on our phones when we're not using it, to prevent having our location tracked. We can also use some of the apps mentioned in the third video, like Whatsapp, that have encryption built into them. We can delete pictures that we no longer need, and only share photos to people who wouldn't share them with the world. One final thing we can do is, as stated by the final video, have an easier way of deleting what is posted online, and if posted by another with malicious intent, be able to punish them.