Privacy, Online & Off


Ted Talks on Privacy online and offline 
After watching these various TED Talks, I started to realize how scary technology can truly be, especially in our society today. In the first video, Catherine Crump explains how police and surveillance technology for our local police departments may be giving away sensitive information. NSA styled mass surveillance is allowing our local departments to gather vast quantitates of information about us, that was never possible in such way before. Even our motor vehicles can keep track of our locations. One of the key technologies driving mass location tracking is the automatic license plate reader. Automatic license plate readers take a picture of every single license plate and keeps it on record, even if you’re not doing anything wrong. Local police then keep a record of the different times your license plate has been captured by their system.  Christopher Soghoian is our second guest who explains the dangers of telephone surveillance.  The telephone companies-built surveillance features into the very core of their networks. Our telephones and the networks that carried out our phone calls were wired tapped first. This means that any normal phone call you could make to a relative or friend could be listened to and recorded by someone else. The people listening could be our government, another government or even a hacker. The Silicon Valley is known for producing strong encryption technology into their products. An example of this would be Apple’s I-Messaging. Apples I-messaging is so encrypted that Apple itself can’t even see the texts.  Other applications such as Facebook and Facetime (Apple) use this same strong encryption tools. Chris then goes on to explain the dangers of wiring tapping. Hackers can easily access a database and steal all of your sensitive information through our communication technology. Backdoors also have no “control” in them, “bad guys and good guys could both use it.” – Chris Soghoian when referring to backdoors. He ends it by saying we must use these encrypted technology tools to stay secure while communicating. He stresses that they’re cheap, reliable and a must need for cyber security. Juan Enriquez explains how our online footprint is similar to tattoos. They’re beautiful, intriguing, serious, and they tell so many stories, just like our online footprint. Face.com was a website that “discovered” 18 Billion faces across its API and applications. Facebook soon bought Face.com in June of 2012. He goes onto explain how are “electronic tattoos,” (digital footprint) could lead us more and more to “immortality.” Overall, we must keep our safety in mind when it comes to communicating, social media, or using the internet. Not everything we may think online is private. I will be sure to follow all of their advice so that one day sensitive information doesn’t leak from one of my profiles !



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