Privacy & Technology

“Internet and privacy are antithesis of each other.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

        Within our extremely technologically-savvy society, the benefits of having up-to-date technology are at an all time high. There are opportunities for better communication, more efficient ways to work, etc.  However, with constantly having technology all around us, there are countless, often serious, violations of personal privacy that can often slip under our noses. 

These issues of privacy have affected my and my family personally in the contexts of identity theft - whether it be via social media hacking, credit card fraud, or scam callers who pretend to be family members, our technological privacy has been seriously violated probably hundreds of times. 

The other week, my grandparents received a call from their "grandson," saying he was in jail and needed $8800 to be bailed out. My grandfather immediately wanted to send my grandmother to the bank, and when asked how to get him the money, the caller, pretending to be my brother, who was supposedly in jail, said "I'll come get it from your house." That's when my grandfather finally realized that it was a scam. New AI technology is making scam calls extremely believable due to voice recognition and generation. This is extremely scary. 

What should the government be doing? 

I believe that the government should regulate the use of data mining via proposing new laws and/or negotiating the company's bylaws and contracts that they hide from users. They should be transparent about the collection of citizen data, which includes healthcare data and stats, license plate data, and other things which they gather from us that a lot of citizens do not know about. 

What can WE do?

Some solutions to protect our personal privacy from technology would include: turning our smartphones completely off, not just on sleep mode, when we are not actively using them, as well as not answering numbers not in our contacts, NO CALLER ID numbers, or those who look like spam, not sharing social media passwords, disabling location sharing on social media as well as our devices, and many more. Though a lot of us (myself included) do not think about doing these things, they will directly benefit our personal privacy.