What is privacy? Privacy has changed significantly over time, and with the rise of the internet and other digital technologies, privacy is going to continue to change for the worse if extreme measures are not taken against. In the past, privacy was mainly a physical concept, focused on protecting one's personal space and possessions from unwanted intrusion. This includes things like locking doors, closing curtains, or keeping personal information confidential.
Today, privacy has taken on a more complex meaning as people spend more and more of their lives online. With the proliferation of social media, e-commerce, and other digital platforms, people share an unprecedented amount of personal information online, often without realizing the implications of doing so.
In many cases, this information is collected and analyzed by companies and governments to target advertising or minitor people's behavior. As a result, the definition of privacy has expanded to include digital privacy, which involves protecting one's personal data and online identity from unauthorized access or misuse. But can we really control our online privacy in today's society? My answer to that question is no.
In all the TED talks I watched assigned to our class which included: Your Online Life Permanent as a Tattoo by Juan Enriquez, The Small and Surprisingly Dangerous Detail the Police Track About You by Catherine Crump, How Revenge Porn Turns Lives Upside Down by Darieth Chisolm, Think Your Email's Private? Think Again by Andy Yen, and How Tech Companies Deceive You Into Giving Up Your Data and Privacy by Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, there is one thing in common, which is how our privacy has become limited to growing technology advancements.
In the video,The Small and Surprisingly Dangerous Detail the Police Track About You by Catherine Crump, she explains how police departments have been detecting and capturing our private whereabouts. There is now video and photo footage getting evidence and information about us like never before. They track things like if we go to church or not, what we do in our free time, who we are with, ect. From this, the government can gain a detailed interpretation of who we are and see who we are based on these images.
They do this by having things like automatic license plate readers which track every plate that passes by the reader and represents mass quantities of data of where all americans have gone. It gives the date, time, location, and may even include a picture of you getting out of your car in your own very driveway. According to Crump, the federal government will tell police cars to drive past certain mosques to see and examine who was attending. This is outrageous to me.
Additionally, Crump communicates that cell towers also track our whereabouts when our phone sends a signal to the tower every 30 seconds just by being turned on. They can send these signals inside homes and entire neighborhoods to see if you are there. Did you know you were signing up for this limited privacy when you bought your everyday cell phone or car? NO!
As consumers and members of this society there is not much we can do about these issues as there is already so much of our information in huge databases that we can not control. The correct answer if you are worried about your privacy issue would be just to get rid of your phone or have it completely turned off everywhere you go or delete all your social medias and internet... but by doing this you are also signing up to fall off the face of the earth which society does not accept these days; and not to mention when you accept the terms and services of any social media, the company now holds your information for life even after you delete your account...
We have lost control of our privacy, data, and life. This is a very relevant issue that is being thrown under the rocks. The government needs to reevaluate the access they are allowed to have on our lives before the internet and rising technologies become anymore powerful than they already are.
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