Privacy, Online and Off

During class, we reviewed a series of Ted Talk videos covering various privacy issues surrounding modern technologies. These issues included but were not limited to, "electronic tattoos", mass location tracking, and wiretapping. 

The First TED talk that we watched was a lecture given by Juan Enriquez. In his lecture, he refers to the idea of "electronic tattoos," the information that we publicly share and all of the data that can be collected from it.  Just as normal tattoos stay with you forever, the information that we share online is also available forever and attached to our faces through facial recognition connected to our social profiles. To explain this concept, he used principles regarding immortality from the ancient Greeks. He refers to the story of Sysiphus, and the fact that our electronic tattoos make up our reputation. He moves on to the story of Orpheus, in which he relays that because there is so much data available, you may not want to look too far into the past of those you care about. His main point throughout his lecture is that what we put out there is available forever. Everything you post has an effect on others, and because of this, we must maintain a sense of professionalism and ethical behavior to maintain our reputations in the future. 

In the second TED talk, we hear from Catherine Crump about mass location tracking. She refers to technologies, including automatic license plate readers, cell tower dumps, stingray technology, and more. Because modern data conservation costs have plummeted with the development of new storage technology, the federal government collects mass quantities of information into databases with millions of data points. This can range from license plate scanning that tracks your location and movements to cell signal information that can ping your location from a cell tower. These privacy violations are incredibly important for citizens. While this information is available to the government, our personal lives are no longer personal. Because these technologies are used so consistently the government is steadily collecting information not only on criminals and terrorists but normal citizens trying to live their day-to-day lives. 

The third TED talk that really stood out to me was from Christopher Soghoian. He talks about the government being extremely infuriated with the encryption features incorporated into tech companies' software. He refers back to the idea that since we all use the same mediums for communication if the government can track certain demographics like criminals and national threats, they are also able to track average members of society.  He specifically talks about the surveillance systems used by Google and Microsoft, as in 2009 they were compromised by the Chinese Government. Because there was a "back door" into the surveillance technology, anyone who knows how can access it. This is inherently important because if anyone can access the information, anyone can see your personal conversations and information. This is a direct threat to our digital privacy.