Online Privacy In Our World

 When it comes to keeping our lives private on social media, I would say mostly everyone in our generation does a somewhat bad job at doing it. With all of us using different social media sites and posting on them about our lives and what we're doing and where we're going, this in general gives people a chance to find and look up what our lives are actually like. Like the life that we don't want to post on social media. Whether that is a credit score, criminal records, or different publications that you don't want people to know about. 

In Juan Enriquez's Ted Talk, he talks about how us posting on social media about our lives can be similar to "Electronic Tattoos". He goes on to talk about how all these social media sites and different technologies that we are using are going to be tracking us with what we do, when we do them, and they will stay on the internet forever. 

In Catherine Crump's Ted Talk, she talks about how the police forces in the United States are getting more equipment to track people in the town that they work in. She starts with talking about location information, where you can be tracked when going anywhere, from school, to work, to even reveal if you are going to a therapist or attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. One example of the police using advanced technologies is the Automatic License Plate Reader. This device scans and takes pictures of any cars license plates that pass by, and the police keep these pictures in a database in case of wrongdoing.

Christopher Soghoian talks about in his Ted Talk about how the phones that we use every day were first wired for surveillance and to track us. He goes on to state that if someone was to be talking to someone on the phone, someone could be listening from your own government. The good thing though is that these Sillicon Valley companies have made it more increasingly difficult for any kind of surveillance to happen in their technologies. In fact, if you have an iPhone, Apple can't see the text messages you send to other to people or listen in to calls and video chats you have with other users. 

Darieth Chisholm talks about cyber harassment, and her experience with it from an ex-boyfriend of hers. She talks about how it all starts with when a relationship basically goes bad. To where an ex-lover who can't handle rejection uses technologies like their phones and laptops to post horrible things about that person, along with even pictures and videos just to get back at them. 

So, what exactly am I getting from all of this? What I learned from all of these Ted Talks talking about privacy online is that there is nothing any person can do at all to try and stay out of the light when it comes to staying private with their lives. No matter what, there will always be someone tracking what we're doing, where we are going, and when we do them. It infuriates me that we live in a world where us people can't have the simplest form of privacy, and to be honest, there really is nothing that we can do to fully make it stop.