Week #14 Privacy, Online & Off

Privacy is essential to a person’s mental and physical health. People need to have some sort of privacy in order to individualize themselves from the crowd and bare their own identities without other people knowing every detail about themselves. In the digital age that we live in, the old ideas of privacy have been stripped away in very interesting ways. Some of these ways are voluntary, like posting things about one’s self on a social media website, and others are taken without direct consent, like having your information taken and sold to advertisement companies without your permission. Specifically, the involuntary information that is released without someone's permission is absolutely absurd. This era that we live in allows everyone to have access to the internet all the time, which causes the capability for these technology to profile and stalk us when we are unsuspecting it. The most amazing thing about this is that people know/suspect that their phones and other technologies are spying on them, but they keep proceeding on. I think that even though people suspect their information is being breached, they do not seem to care as much as if someone snatched their credit card out of their hands in front of them. This is due to the layer of anonymity between the algorithms spying on them and their devices. Essentially, it does not seem as bad if they do not know the exact details on what is actually happening to them. That is one of the major reasons why people truly do not seem to care about their privacy being compromised in today's technology driven society.

https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_soghoian_government_surveillance_this_is_just_the_beginning?language=en