In a world full of technology and information at everybody’s fingertips, privacy is essentially nonexistent. This is easy to forget--it seems that every person has a lot of privacy. Every email address, social media profile, bank account, etc. is password protected, and there are many ways to “hide” information, such as archiving or deleting posts and setting social media accounts to ‘private’, but nothing is really completely private. Websites retain information, and can sell that information to other companies. I watched a few Ted Talk videos that discussed privacy (and lack thereof) on the internet.
In Juan Enriquez’s Ted Talk Your online life, permanent as a tattoo, he discusses the lack of privacy on the internet today and compares it to a tattoo: permanent, and … The issue is, this kind of electronic tattoo is much more dangerous, as this kind of tattoo is immortal and will easily outlive the average person’s lifespan. He also delves into facial recognition, and how one single name can lead to finding someone’s Facebook, Google, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. This freaked me out quite a bit, and I looked up my name on Google out of curiosity. I found a ton of results relating to me and my personal life, which was kind of scary.
In Catherine Crump’s The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you, she introduces this technology that virtually nobody in the audience has heard about: a device that the police and government use to track license plates. This may not sound that crazy or an invasion of privacy, but this information is being stored by police “just in case” it is needed later. The police can see where people are going with these trackers, and paint a profile of a citizen without them even knowing. This was really shocking to me, especially since I had no idea this device existed. It would not affect my daily life that much, since I don’t (and will not) do anything to break the law or get me in trouble, but it is still unsettling, knowing that I can’t do anything about the government tracking my license plate.
The story that affected me the most was Darieth Chisolm’s How revenge porn turns lives upside down. She opens up with an incredibly emotional story about how her ex-husband being sent a website full of explicit photos of her. She details how she felt humiliated, embarrassed, and ashamed, and how she felt like “my world was coming to an end.” You can hear the raw emotion in her voice as she says this, and I could practically feel her pain and how devastating it was to her.
No comments:
Post a Comment