Privacy, Online and Off

The problem with maintaining privacy online is how the information we voluntarily share is being used by companies like Facebook. Technology is valuable – until it turns against us. When you discover your privacy has been violated, it can feel frightening and unfortunately, with today’s advancements in technology, it enables people, corporations, and governments to violate our privacy on a massive scale…whenever and wherever. With an increase in people tuning into technology to hear news about the coronavirus, who knows how involved the government and other surreptitious spies are listening into conversations. 

Your Online Life, Permanent as a Tattoo

Tattoos say a lot, so you don’t how to. What if a social media network turned out to be electronic tattoos? What if they provide as much information about who you are, just like a tattoo? Electronic tattoos are much more serious nowadays because we can take a picture and get facial recognition of almost anyone in the picture, and then retrieve information about them. Our electronic tattoos make us immortal because our information will remain online forever. The Greeks thought about when God, humans, and immortality mix. That time is now. An example from the Greeks was that Atalanta was the greatest runner and would challenge anybody. If you won, she would marry you and if you lost, you died. Hippomenes challenged and beat her. He won because he had all these little golden apples, and Atalanta would run ahead, and he’d roll a little golden apple, which distracted her and allowed him to win the race. All these little golden apples come and reach you, and want to post about them. We must be careful with what we publish online because we can’t undo it. The advantages of technology distracts us from the disadvantages it has. An example from Latin America about God, humans, and immortality combining was from the poet Jorge Luis Borges. He was threatened by the Argentine military junta, and asked “how else can one threaten, other than with death?” The answer is with immortality, which is what we are threatened with due to our electronic tattoos.

Juan Enriquez giving his TED Talk about Your Online Life, Permanent as a Tattoo.

The Small and Surprisingly Dangerous Detail the Police Track About You

NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling local police departments to gather vast quantities of personal information about anyone and everyone, which was never possible in the past. With these advancements, the government can observe the location of individuals and how private citizens interact. Also, local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on the information the government obtains. A key technology to mass location tracking is “the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader.” This technology captures images of every passing car and put into a list of cars wanted for wrongdoing. This Reader includes the date, time, and location the police department had captured the cars as well as where they were going and who they were with. Why is it okay for the government to collect this information? The reason it’s happening is because they think someday it may be useful. The government is using and abusing their power over individuals, and it is happening not just in the United States, but all over the world. These License Plate Reader’s aren’t the only tracking devices law enforcement agents have available to them. For example, they can use a device called StingRay to send tracking signals inside homes in order to identify the cell phones located there. People are even saying that smart home devices may be the governments way of listening in on domestic conversations. 

How to Avoid Surveillance…With the Phone in Your Pocket

Telephone companies have provided wiretapping assistance to governments. Surveillance used to take place manually and wires were connected by hand and recorded by tape; however, technological advancements allowed companies to put surveillance features into the core of their networks. When you are on the phone having a personal conversation, the government, another government, or even another party/person could be listening in. Apple and WhatsApp have built strong encryption technology into their product, allowing people to communicate without an authoritarian figurehead wiretapping our messages. Governments are mad because tech companies have democratized these encryption to the default setting. Government officials believe all communications should be available to them, and encryption is making that difficult. Although tapping into terrorists, hackers, drug dealers, etc. communication services would be beneficial, “when you build a backdoor into a communications network or piece of technology, you have no way of controlling who’s going to go through it.”

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My Online Presence

With an unspecified end to quarantine, we remain inside and connected to technology. I am online every day for classes as well as keeping myself entertained with watching movies and tv shows. I am also up to date on social media in order to stay in touch with my friends and family in different parts of the world. Normally I don’t have much of a large online footprint. I don’t have a personal website other than this blog for class. I am on social media; however, I go on Snapchat at night, I sometimes go on Instagram, and I never really check Facebook. On snapchat, I usually send one picture to my friends and family at night just to keep my streaks. On Instagram, I post pictures of big events or even pictures of my friends and family. The only time I used Facebook was for one of my classes to comment on Nido Qubein School of Communication posts. The big footprint I have when it comes to technology is for schoolwork, messaging my family when I’m away at college, and LinkedIn. The information that a visitor could glean about me, even indirectly, by visiting my pages on social media would be my name, where I go to school, what state I live in, who my family and friends are, and what events I am involved in, just to name a few things they would discover. The private information I have voluntarily given out when applying to social media sites like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook was my phone number, e-mail address, and birthday. The private information I voluntarily given out to LinkedIn was my phone number, e-mail, and state in which I reside in. I gave my private information out to these sites because it was required to include this information in order to set up an account. 

In a recent article in Fast Company, a 14-year-old girl “unplugged” from social media.  Sonia Bokhari wasn’t really interested in social media, and since she didn’t have a smartphone and wasn’t allowed to join any sites at all until she was 13, it wasn’t much of an issue for her to not be connected. When she finally got connected to social media, she disappointingly saw that her mother and sister posted embarrassing photos from her childhood for all their followers to see. She thought she was beginning her public online life; however, there were already hundreds of pictures and stories of her online that she didn’t have control over. She felt like her privacy was violated. I understand why she feels that way considering her mother quoted her and posted many embarrassing photos; however, her mother may have thought she was capturing a memorable moment of her child and wanted to share it with the world. As stated in the article, we shouldn’t post negative or inappropriate pictures because it could affect our school life and future job opportunities. A big mistake Bokhari made with social media was that they were all public. Unlike Bokhari, all my accounts are private, and I only follow people that I know. 

Not many people know how Facebook actually works and how it makes its money, profiting from invading our online privacy. “Facebook uses information about their behaviors and friendships to deduce a constantly updating list of their interests” (Madrigal, 2019). If it knows what people are interested in, it can put ads in front of them to encourage them to purchase the product. About 50% of Americans would feel uncomfortable with Facebook’s business practices. I don’t really use Facebook, so I haven’t stopped to think too much about what I have on the social media network and what information I’ve given the company. The only information that they could get about me is the personal information I had to put in when setting up an account. Facebook and occasionally other social media networks make me feel that our personal information and privacy is not taken into consideration because companies will do whatever it takes to make a profit. “Two publicly accessible caches of Facebook user data created third-party applications that connected to the Facebook platform” (Gallagher, 2019). With that being said, Facebook asked some users for their email address and email password in order to register accounts. This makes people wonder about the lack of safety and privacy violations that Facebook has committed. 

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Does Coronavirus Measures Violate Civil Rights?

The coronavirus is taking the United States by storm. It is controlling our lives and it is very hard to get rid of due to major increases in patients with the virus and not a lot of tests or doctors to treat them right away. State governors have banned public gatherings, like church, and declares orders for isolation to decrease the spread of the coronavirus across the United States.

These declarations to ban large gatherings help shape how public health officials can respond at the state and local level, allowing them to act fast while instituting forms of social distancing. Officials usually have to go through legal processes to close an establishment or shut down public gatherings, but with states from California to North Carolina being under a state of emergency, everything is expedited. 

When someone chooses to ignore high recommendations to remain inside their home, public health authorities can seek a court order mandating their compliance. These measures aren’t undertaken without due process, which is fair treatment through the normal judicial system. 

People seem rather okay with undermining core civil liberties in order to fight the pandemic. The measures taken to decrease the number of patients with COVID-19 limit individual freedom and may violate rights guaranteed by national constitutions. The threat by leaders of Newark, New Jersey, to prosecute people who spread false information about the virus, could violate the First Amendment. Even the U.S. Department of Justice “has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies.”

In the picture above is Dr. Li Wenliang. He was the first doctor to speak out about the coronavirus before he passed away from it. 

In the first few weeks of discovering this new virus, China implemented social media censorship, which concerned the failures of China’s leadership in controlling the outbreak. Since this is a new virus and China didn’t have access to information about it when if first broke out, they didn’t know how to take precautions. This censorship on social media prevented the world from preparing to avoid getting the coronavirus. Now that the virus is spread nationally, we must take action and listen to officials in order to eliminate or even decrease our chances of getting it. Although COVID-19 is very powerful, there are ways to diminish it. We must stay inside and continuously wash our hands.

COVID-19 is probably the most talked about concern in the news right now. I feel that more than ever people are tuning into technology to see these daily updates about it. Through these updates, we are told that COVID-19 is dictating people’s lives because once you catch the virus, the incubation period is long and dreadful.

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