Privacy In The Digital Age

Ethan Parker 

9/13/21

Technology as we know it has been very beneficial for our everyday use. Technology helps us perform many different things that we would not be able to do if we didn't have a cell phone, a laptop, or wifi present. With all great advancements, there is always a form of counter fire. Technology is great in all but it can also be a pain to many of the individuals that use it along with their families, friends, and everyday lives. The issues of the electronic tattoo, the police tracking our movements, the cell phone surveillance, and electronic cyber bullying are all issues that play a role in the everyday lives of humans. These issues are quite scary and can have a long lasting impact on tons of people. These issues certainly affect me as well.

It is not fun to hear that I am constantly being tracked every time I leave my drive way or my cell phone being under surveillance 24 hours of the day. This can actually become very dangerous for me and the ones that are around me because I have no idea who could be following me or watching me at all times. I cannot stand that they scan my license plate and always know where I am headed, that puts me at complete risk because I always have a pair of eyes set on me and if it were to be hacked, the person who hacked the system would know my street address, who is with me the most often, where I work or go to school, and what my family looks like. This issue must be handled or limited in some fashion because it seems like the government is just trying to take over the entire world. They are trying to track everyone and know all the moves that are happening at once and it is not fair, we have the right to freely live our lives, we should not have to be monitored all the time. My friends and family are also being affected by my car being tracked. Since my friends and family are who I am around the most, there is no telling how many times their faces have been caught when scanning my vehicle. It is a shame to say that by just riding in the car with me, I put my friends and family at risk of being caught in a digital picture that will be stored and kept forever and there is no telling who  decides what is done with the picture of the people around me, will it be stored for usage or trashed, we'd never know or find out. The government must put an end to this. How come there has not been some form of debate within the governmental system about this enormous issue? The government is supposed to protect our rights but they are funding police officers who drive vehicles that pretty much follow our every move, and who is to say the government is not 100 percent apart of this process? There is no way they know nothing about this issue, they need to act for the people immediately and stop stalking our everyday lives. It is very sad to say, there is almost nothing we can do about this invasion issue. Many need transportation and we must have a vehicle at home to get from point A to point B and there is almost no way around stopping the pictures uploaded by the police scanners as long as we have to get to work, pick up friends and family, and go somewhere such as the grocery store. In order to protect ourselves from these police trackers is to move to another country or a very unknown state in the US that does not have much police attention, but that is very unlikely. If we want to stop the tracking of our vehicles, we must live somewhere with no vehicle present but that is a hard ask because "we the people" have the right to live our everyday lives and the government should be on our side.

The surveillance on a cell phone is entirely unfair and should also be changed immediately due to the fact that many people have a cellular device and use it to carry out conversations to the ones they love every single day. This issue relates to me heavily especially because I do have a cell phone and I know for sure that many of my friends and family members do as well. These issues affect me strongly because I always have my phone with me pretty much at all times. It is painful to hear that we are being monitored based on our cell phones because I know I use mine often and pretty much keep it with me everywhere I go. What else is being tracked through my cell phone? Since I have my cell phone so much, they know where I go the most, they know who I talk with the most on the phone and this makes me feel unsafe. It makes me feel as if my identity can be taken away from me easily and quickly and that is certainly not a great feeling. Since they have surveillance on my cell phone, they must know my phone number easily, they must know my location, they must know my credit card information, and they most likely also know who is the most important person to me based on my recent call logs. Yes this puts me at extreme danger being that I can lose my identity and a hacker can pretty much take my life over, as well as this puts my friends and family at huge risks also. Since my friends and family are in such close contact with me through my cell phone, who's to say the information they tell me has not been recored? My friends and family may trust me with specific information that is being taken and told elsewhere, they're street addresses could be recored as well since they send me information like that through text messaging. Due to me being tracked and monitored via my cell phone, the ones around me and in my circle are not at risk and could be in nearly as much danger as I am. It is not that difficult for hackers to break into surveillance systems or spy on specific projects such as the one that tracks our phones. The government must put an end to the tracking of our cell phones, they need to let us live our lives, especially being that we use our cell phones so much and because they are so important to many of us today. But it is sad because, the government is who is behind this all. The Government is tracking us through our cellular devices, they track every move we make and it is scary. It seems like we are living in a robotic world where everything we do is being watched with multiple sets of eyes. Can we even do anything to protect ourselves from this extreme invasion of privacy? It would be very hard to do actually since many of us actually need the cell phone to stay in contact with many people they love. The cell phone provides a wide variety of things that help us all go about our daily lives and it is hard to just throw that away but I guess it is a fair price to pay to no longer be tracked and followed even though the government will find a way around it and continually track us, so is it even worth it?

Cyber bullying should also be stopped in an instant, this is very dangerous and can ruin the lives of many people. This issue does not seem to affect me as much as it may others because I am not always on the social medias constantly as well as I have not run into any of those relationships where I have had someone who was so upset to where they wanted to ruin my entire life forever and not care the consequences. But there are still people out there that want to ruin who you are, they'd love to see you fall and be unable to do what you were doing before. Say for example I was always on social media, constantly putting my business out there, I could easily run into some form of cyber bullying that may have roots that could lead it to being worse than just cyber bullying. This issue would affect me heavily because I would have this narrative that many will see and it would send many different question towards my direction. This issue would hurt me in the long run because misinformation could be being loaded onto many different sites and all over the media about me and I would not even know right away. This could ruin all of my future chances at something I have had in mind, it could easily ruin my lifelong goals, it could take away my job and many other valuable aspects about my life. This issue would have a lesser impact on my friends and family but it could still impact them in the long run. My family would soon have bad information on their name and they'd be constantly looked at as the people who around the person (being me) with all of the misinformation (bad things) that are going around. My family would be trashed and looked at awkwardly also and it'd simply be because someone out there on social media or the internet found someone (being me) that puts everything about their life on the internet. My friends would distance themselves from me due to all of the hate and weird looks that'd be coming their way. They would not want to be know as the friend of the guy who lost his job because of said information. It would not look good on them at all. As soon as my life would be ruined, my friends and families lives would be hurt as well. These issues are hard to cope with and the government must do some form of justice for those who do have to go through something of this nature. The government should be looking to help us inserted of letting things like this slide by. The woman on the TedTalk should have gotten more attention than she did and not the negative attention, but someone of government looking to help her case. The government must be more on top of these things and be looking out for signs of the cyber attacking and bullying because it is ruining lives and it is costing people their occupations. There are some ways to stop this, but in the case of the woman on the TedTalk, there is no way to stop a crazy man such as the one she described. Although, when on social media, limit what you post or talk about because there is always someone watching and oftentimes, someone documenting what you post. That is how we must stop the cyber attacking, we need to give less resources for these people built with anger to have, we are giving them everything they want in information about our lives. Our lively information must be more cared for and information that we believe should be secreted, in which it should be. By doing this, it will be harder for those built off this anger to make us look so bad and cause us to lose something valuable like our job. 

In conclusion, being that we are US citizens and have lives of our own, we should not have to worry about the privacy invasions through a variety of different directions. The government should be the ones to help stop these privacy invasions but it looks like they are the ones leading it. We must come together and value our information much more, become more secretive and ask questions often, and most importantly, we need to read through all terms and conditions policies.