Blog post #5 | Privacy

Privacy in technology has become a concern over the last two to three decades. As technology advances, so does personalization and tracking. Your iPhone has been tailored to track data from scrolling or looking at products. For example, if I was looking up Star Wars helmets on Safari one day, the very next day I could be scrolling through Instagram and find advertisements trying to sell me Star Wars helmets or other Star Wars products. Until recently, that was the case across the board with handheld devices. Apple recently released an update to their Apple products which requires apps to ask if they can track your data. This is a big win in terms of individuals protecting themselves from being profiled and put in databases of information. 

The issue of technology progressing enough to violate my privacy has become my concern as I have gotten older. As a kid, I did not have to worry about this stuff because I did not have a phone, or at least my mom's phone wasn't really my phone. Anyhow, as I got older, I was given access to technology, like an iPhone in my name & a laptop for college which I could utilize to download games, create an account on Instagram, connect with people across the world, and surf the web to find things that might make my day-to-day a little easier. What's concerning about this is that for most of these activities, they take my data and store it somewhere to be more personal to me; to make it easier to sell or appeal to me. For instance, Instagram determines the watch time of every reel I watch and if I watch one reel longer than the rest, it throws me more reels that may have the same captions or the same semantics as the reel I watched longer before. 

The government should help corporations when they try to protect our privacy. Recently the FBI encouraged iPhone & Android users to stop using their traditional texting apps and move to encrypted texting platforms, like WhatsApp. The FBI doing this is a good example of what the government should be doing but should be doing, and what they do doesn't exactly line up all the time. Federal employees aren't even safe from this, with the Trump Administration wanting to set up an email system that is designed to send emails to all Federal employees' inboxes. At the forefront, this seems innocent, but if it is hacked then that hacker has the name and more information of every Federal government employee. It is seeing backlash thankfully, but if it were to follow through that could be a serious potential breach of privacy for all employees in the government. 

Data collection is something my family should be concerned about, my friends should be concerned about, and I should be concerned about. We should not be fond of the fact an entity, which could turn against any human at any point, that knows exactly who we are and what we would do. While I do understand this is for security's sake, this is not how you ensure people remain safe. Who I am & what I do should not be anyone's business unless I opt for it to be. When I post on Instagram, I am opting for the world & Instagram to know what I have been up to lately, and that's fine. If Instagram were to take my interests and try to market them though, that would be a breach of my trust and security. 

Something we can do about protecting ourselves from entities that collect our data can be simple or just a little harder than simple. Simple is deleting the account and opting to have that data not be tracked one hundred percent anymore. This is not ideal, so I recommend going with the second option, which is utilizing the "Limit Data Settings" functions on the apps you use that could track data. By taking the time to limit the data an app or internet thing could collect, you make your life more private and make it harder for an entity to figure out how to exploit you.