My thoughts on Privacy

Privacy is rare to come by these days. The government, law enforcement departments, and social medias are collecting our information from our emails, phone conversations, text messages, and google searches. After listening to a Ted Talk, I learned that surveillance features are built into our phones. We may not realize it, but the phones we keep in our pockets are constantly listening to us. Christopher Soghoian raised the point during his Ted Talk that it may be our own government listening to us, but it also could be another countries government listening to us. This point is very frightening, and violating. No one should be able to listen to the conversations we have with our friends, but its worse that we don't know exactly who is listening to us.

Catherine Crump gave a Ted Talk on how police departments are essentially stalking us. They have created automatic license plate readers that are mounted on light poles or the backs of the police cars. These readers scan the plate and convert the information into details of who's car it is and the information about them. They can track where the people are traveling too, and sometimes see who they are traveling with. It's an uncomfortable feeling knowing that information about me, and where I am traveling is being collected when I have done nothing wrong.

I feel these features can be beneficial when trying to track criminals, or prevent future crimes from happening, but should not be use against people that are regular civilians. The information thats being collected is being turned against us and used for reasons we may not even know about. This is a lesson to learn for everyone. We need to be aware of what is going on in our pockets because everything we say around our phones, or search on google could potentially be being tracked by someone or something. After listening to these Ted Talks I will be sure to think twice about the images and messages I am sending and the conversations I am having over the phone.

Ted Talk