Privacy

As technology has made life much more convenient, it has also made our personal lives much more public and unsafe. Any information a person enters online becomes a “digital tattoo” as described in the Juan Enriquez TED talk. Today, people have a variety of social media accounts, they shop online, and they use the internet for a variety of other reasons. And each and every move a person makes is being tracked and stored. No one’s privacy is safe. It is now possible for companies and the government to collect and store information about all of us, but why does this information we enter have to come at the expense of a person giving up their privacy?

Data is no longer safe or controllable. We have lost control of our personal data and our privacy. Ideas that gave way to search engines like Google, social media sites like Facebook, email accounts, etc are amazing and have changed the world we live in for better and for worse. It starts when a person does a basic search. The topic follows them wherever they go. And, once a person enters information on any site on the internet, the information is stored and analyzed and compared with other data to get more detailed information about a person.They are tracked further and content is then pushed to them. It starts when a person sends an email to someone. It is not like a letter as Any Yen stated in his TED talk. It is more like a postcard where anyone can read it. Once you hit send on your email, it goes through many hands/eyes before including internet providers, email providers, even the government, before it ever gets to the intended recipient.

The more technology is developed and improved, the more our ability to hide and have personal information remain personal becomes more challenging. Take for example, something we all enjoy doing on a daily basis, using the camera on our cell phone. When you take a photo, the photo is tagged with the location of where the photo was taken. It is also installing facial recognition and can potentially associate a photo with a person’s name. Now assuming you took a photo of a stranger in a park, you are now able to take that photo, find out their name and then Google them to find out more information about them and just like that, you know more about this stranger and you have never even met them. Clearly, a loss of a person’s privacy.

People are buying more online than offline these days. And in this new world of shopping, the data we provide at each website is no longer safe. Retailers store the data consumers input and that information is then “unprotected” and can be a part of a data breach. Or what about a person’s medical records. A patient file is now fully digital and many of the hospitals and medical groups provide access to this information in online websites - also at a risk for hacking and a data breach. Part of the process before seeing a doctor, is signing off to give a doctor permission to maintain your records in a digital format.

And to think that I can not even get into my car and go somewhere without being tracked represents an invasion of my privacy. In Catherine Krumps TED talk she elaborates. Advanced military weapons and equipment are making their way to local police departments. Video surveillance is now common. Location information and location trackers can reveal all the places that you visit. Government gains a detail portrait about how private citizens interact. Automatic license plate readers are everywhere -- mounted on poles, on police cars, etc  -- and they can quickly get a description of the owner of the car, their habits and whether or not person in the car to see if they are on any government hot lists. But local police are keeping track of every plate that passes these readers, and now no one’s privacy is safe. Her example of Mike showed that the police captured he was going, who he was with, where he shopped and even tracked him getting out of his own car in his own driveway. And you can be certain that Mike is not the only one being tracked. Photos of all people going about their daily lives are being captured. Personal identities are no longer safe.

And, as the cost of storing data has gone down, the ability to store tons and tons of data is that much easier. Therefore, the increase in these types of privacy-invading technologies are on the rise. A person must be smart in order to do the best they can to protect their privacy.  Each person must consider every post they make, every photo they upload, every dialog in every chat room, every tweet they make and every email they send because once a person hits “enter”, everything they post is public. Privacy as we know it today will never exist again. No one is immune!