Privacy, On & Offline

Watching these four videos shows how concerned we all should be for our privacy, both on and offline. The videos revealed how things as simple as phone calls, text messages, and even places you drive to are accessed by the government. The constant surveillance from the government and the usage of people's online information by large cooperations is something that negatively impacts everyone's privacy, which should not be allowed. 

This is an issue that causes harm to myself, and everyone else. We all have digital footprints online, which we now know are all being watched by the government. As a person who grew up using different kinds of social media, this heavily impacts me and all of my friends and family who use it as well. This was discussed in the TED Talk done by Juan Enriquez, where he talks about how we all have "electronic tattoos" online. He uses the term as an expression to say how your presence online is the same as having a tattoo on your body, or in other words, that your online presence is permanent. It's important for us to remember this, because the more personal information we put on the internet, the less privacy we will have. Anything we post about ourselves will be out there forever, whether we delete it from our profiles or not. Though the government doesn't just track our online presence, but also our texts and phone calls. In the TED Talk done by Christopher Soghoian, he discusses the way the government taps into our phones through wiretapping to look at our phones. This means that everyone, including myself and my loved ones, are having out private conversations watched everyday by the government, which they have no business in listening to. I find it really shocking that this kind of invasive surveillance is allowed to take place, when the line between safety and invasion of privacy has been crossed. 

In my opinion, I think the government should put heavier regulations on the amount of information they are given access to. As of right now, there are clearly not enough laws in place to protect our privacy, since we are being watched to such an extent that even our personal conversations are being listened to. It's at a point where our information and online presence are also being used to harm people, which was discussed in Darieth Chisolm's TED Talk about how revenge porn is done as a way of hurting others online. Laws against revenge porn have only came about in recent years, which shows how further changes need to be made to stop the numerous ways our information can be used against us. 

People are aware of the dangers this kind of surveillance has on our privacy, which is why there are now multiple ways for people to protect themselves from these invasions of privacy. Many people install VPNs to their electronic devices, which is an encryption service that blocks their internet activity from being seen by outside parties. This helps us feel more secure in our internet history being private, without the government being able to watch whenever they please. We also now know that we have to be careful with what we decide to put online so that information which is more personal does not fall into the wrong hands.