Blog Post 5

TED TALK:

After watching the Ted Talks, it is safe to say anything we do is being watched, tracked, and stored. Many people have this notion that the internet is somewhat safe and that these companies protect our data; however, that is not the case. They literally take every piece of data they can and sell it to other companies. 

In the first Ted Talk with Juan Enriquez, he talks about digital tattoos. Digital tattoos are information about the users. For example, with Facebook, everything we post or say (even if deleted) will be forever on its servers. Another crazy thing he talks about is Face.com. Before this Ted Talk I had no idea what this was, but after he explained it, I realized how much information these companies sell. Face.com in 2011 had around 18 billion faces. It was ultimately bought out from Facebook in 2012. However, Face.com was able to give people records of people with just a picture of their face. People can get so much information on other people without even knowing or talking to them. 

In the second Ted Talk with Catherine Crump, she discusses how police and the government can track you. They can do this via automatic license plate readers, GPS trackers in vehicles, and cameras on the side of the road. These devices can determine where you travel frequently, your daily driving routes, and basically anywhere you go. The intent of license plate readers is to determine whether a car has been stolen, if your registration has expired, etc. Realistically, you would think it just checks the license plate and gets deleted. However, that is not the case. The police departments keep all the data just in case they need it for the future. They have millions of innocent people's data, just in case. After hearing about this, I wonder how many photos of my license plates they have. 

Due to the controversy surrounding this, some states are taking action. In North Carolina, there is a law that limits the retention of license plate data to 90 days. This may sound like a step in the right direction. However, you probably drive past a license plate reader every day, whether that be on the side of the road or mounted on the top of a police car. 

In the last Ted Talk with Christopher Soghoian, he discusses how the government has so much access to our phone calls and how the telephone companies have provided them with wiretapping assistance. When the government first started listening to our phone calls, they were done manually. However, as technology increased, calls were then recorded to tapes and drives so they could be reviewed. This is no secret. Many people know the saying "Big Brother is always watching," but I don't think they realize how much they're watching. Something that kind of freaked me out and did not put much thought into was how other governments have the same technology and can be listening to our conversations as well. 

On the other hand, companies like Apple and WhatsApp have created sophisticated encryption that makes it difficult for the government to read people's text and monitor their calls. However, this is a double-edged sword. I believe in privacy, but many terrorist organizations communicate via WhatsApp and Apple iMessage. If these are super encrypted where the government cannot see them, it could lead to an attack that they could have potentially prevented. Overall, this makes you wonder what is more important, people's privacy or people's safety. 

Overall, it is crazy to think how much data companies, police departments, and government have on us. Watching these Ted Talks really opened my eyes to how, everything you do, someone is listening, tracking, or watching you and saving it to a drive. Just looking at these Ted Talks on Ted.com, I bet they took my information. Things are only going to get worse as technology increases and there is basically nothing we can do.