Blog #2: Privacy

One of the biggest problems we have as a society is a lack of privacy. Digitally, we have seen major violations of personal privacy rights in recent years. This takes place in many different forms that were raised in the videos. For example, the first Ted Talk mentions how facial recognition technology can be problematic because through the ability to identify people in a picture, it can also be used to get someone’s digital records like their credit score or twitter. A way that this issue affects me as well as my friends and family is that this technology is used with regard to virtually everyone as all that is required is someone to have a picture of you. Just by having that picture, the software can identify huge amounts of information about you. 

The third Ted Talk discussed how for over 100 years, telephone companies have helping the government wiretap people. Wiretapping is when a phone call is monitored. The reason this affects everyone is that any person could have their call wiretapped. It doesn’t need to be by the government. Anyone could wiretap another call and get access to massive amounts of personal information. One the things that a person could do to protect themselves is to use text messaging on an iPhone. The messages sent are encrypted which makes them extraordinarily difficult for anyone else to access. This is important because if someone values their privacy, they should use technology that will help them maintain security and privacy. 

The government can do a lot to protect personal privacy. For example, they could pass a new law that limits the kind of wiretapping they are able to do. In addition, they could require any cell phone to have the built-in encryption technology in order to be sold. Overall, the government could significantly help protect privacy.