Blog Post #5 - Privacy, Online and Off

 A major concern in recent years that everyone has nowadays is privacy and their personal security towards their information online, one of the most important things in this day and age is your information, so privacy is a necessity. The problem that we're facing is the breaching of this privacy and access to our incredibly valuable information, that practically displays everything about us. We basically live through technology; the world wouldn't be moving or revolving if it wasn't utilized so heavily to fit our needs and circumstances that show new avenues of innovation. But with this new innovation, more security is needed to catch up and progress alongside it. 

A main part of our security that needs to be addressed is tracking. Most apps and our iPhones, in general, are utilizing tracking to track our location and keep tabs on where we go and what we do. Apple has revolutionized technology for the better, but with it comes this tracking and invasion of privacy that most have ignored and overlooked.

Another part of this tracking is through advertisements and what is directed at us online. A major understanding of this tracking is through what is advertised to us personally based on what we see online and what we direct our attention to. Something about this tracking that's always stuck with me is a story I heard years ago about an experiment a married couple ran, where they turned off their internet, devices, electronics, and whatever else could be seen as a "device" completely and talked specifically about one type of thing per day. This ranged from a certain stuffed animal to games or movies, etc. Once they turned their internet back on and started utilizing their devices again, almost every single advertisement was strictly towards those specific things they would talk about. 

This shows that there's a constant breach of privacy, no matter where we go or what we do, due to the need for these electronics and their usefulness in our lives. Our improved technology brought along a security risk at all times, especially with our normal lives being constantly monitored. Alongside our normal lives, our data is stored practically everywhere we go on the internet and can be accessed at will by the companies we give it to just by visiting their sites at the easiest or agreeing to their data collection at the hardest.

Another area of concern is through our government, where back at the end of January the government, and more specifically Donald Trump and the Trump Administration's Office of Personnel Management, attempted to pass the notion of setting up an encrypted type of unique email system specifically tailored towards government officials to mass send them emails. This is probably one of the stupidest forms of privacy that can easily be figured out and eventually hacked. Thank God that they received such severe backlash for this ideation since the ease of access that people could gain if something went wrong through this encrypted email system is insanely vast. 

Privacy is something that everyone should be concerned about, but it's become an overlooked and avoided understanding of safety towards people, mainly for the fact that we usually try to ignore whatever privacy concerns are brought up due to them being lengthy and annoying to read. Most people's attention spans are lower nowadays, especially younger people, and they don't have enough care to carefully look over what is at stake for doing something as simple as signing a document. 

What we do shouldn't be anyone's business to scour through, and we should be completely protected at all times instead of having a constant worry about having our information stolen. We cannot have these businesses and powerful entities deliberately getting our information and marketing it around, further creating a breach in trust overall with better technology growth throughout the world and who creates it. 

There are still plenty of ways to limit this tracking, with Apple recently adding a function to the iPhone and its apps, where most apps are forced to ask if you'd allow your data to be tracked across other websites for more accurate advertising and posts directed towards your interests. This shows a bit more about the tracking that goes on behind the scenes that most don't realize or understand but is a better act of privacy than what we had before.