How Privacy is Changing

As a society we are at a fork in the road when it comes to privacy. One path is to give more privacy to the people, and to keep their data away from tech companies and the government. The other is taking away the people's privacy to allow the government and tech companies to watch and store every aspect of our lives online. The question society has to answer is which path is the correct one and which leads to disaster? 

Today we live a good amount of our lives online in some type of way, and these online lives can be much more impactful than what someone could do in their real life. As seen in Juan Enriquez's TED Talk about online tattoos, our digital lives will outlive our bodies by a wide margin, and it's not close, and these digital lives are a type of tattoo on our virtual self. By searching through people's Twitter profiles, what they post on Instagram, the jobs they've posted about on LinkedIn, or credit scores one can know almost everything about a person without ever speaking a word to them. For Gen Z, we have been told all our lives to be careful what we post online because it can never be completely deleted. This has come true in recent times in the form of cancel culture. We've seen a celebrity’s reputation be completely destroyed all because of one tweet they posted years prior. Everything we do or say online is going to stay there in some form, and it's only going to get worse as more technology that logs aspects about our lives is introduced into society. Another breach of privacy rights people encounter is when someone posts explicit photos, words, or videos of another with malicious intent, in other words, revenge porn. Darieth Chisolm was a victim of revenge porn by an ex-boyfriend, and it ruined her personal life and mental health. She found there is only 1 pending bill to protect victims in the US, at the time of the video. While she was able to get the photos taken down, it was very expensive and humiliating for her to deal with the situation. But her result isn't the rule, as not everyone can pay the money it costs to take down the explicit material of them removed.

Our privacy isn't only being betrayed by ourselves, but also by our own governments as Catherine Crump discusses in her TED Talk about police surveillance and its complexity. She reveals to the audience how police use automatic license plate readers to log not only suspect vehicles, but every single person's vehicle and their whereabouts. In addition to that they also employ the use of cell tower dumps to see who is using a cell tower and where they are using it from. With the technology we have today for recognition software, the widespread use by police departments is an invasion of our private lives, especially when used on innocent civilians that haven't done anything wrong. When so much about our daily lives is being stored by the government it begins to create a mass surveillance state where nothing we do is private and kept away from prying eyes and ears. 

Even though there is so many different things chipping away at our privacy, it isn't completely destroyed yet. Christopher Soghoian lists multiple ways your privacy is still being valued and protected. Silicon Valley companies, like Apple, are now putting more encryptions and protections on their phones than ever before, and turning them on as a default setting. To the point that even Apple cannot read text messages one sends to another Apple product. Messaging apps like WhatsApp also have this high level encryption on messages all over the world, protecting people from totalitarian governments everywhere. While this can stop the authorities from catching potential criminals by not seeing what they write and talk on the phone about, the general protection of the masses should outweigh that.