Privacy

 

With the rise of technology usage in the United States and worldwide, the issue of privacy and safety needs to be stressed. New technological developments would have led to mass surveillance and location tracking advancements. Awareness of these new developments allows citizens to protect themselves and their families. 

Mass surveillance by police departments has arisen with the development of automatic license plate readers. These readers, which are placed on street corners and police cars, were first developed to help automate the process of running a license plate in the database manually. Now, cameras combined with new technology scan every license plate regardless of whether the person is under investigation or not. This is a significant change because before this technology was implemented, a license plate was only run through the database if you were suspected of committing a crime or traffic violation. Now, every license plate that passes the camera is recorded and saved in a database. This has led to hundreds of thousands of people getting their photos taken and imputed to a database 

even though they did nothing wrong. Police departments keep these photos and information in case they need it in the feature. This affects not only my family and me but also all of my friends and loved ones. Photos are taken and stored without the individual even knowing and can be used years down the road against you. These issues personally affect me because these cameras are also used to track my everyday movements, including where I go, whom I see, and the things I like. This information can then be used to develop a picture of my life that law enforcement and other entities can use against me. If the surveillance system is ever hacked into, this information about myself is available, leaving me vulnerable. 

Another way our privacy and security are being abused is through the use of a cell tower dump. Cell tower dumps reveal the caller's location along with the other cell towers used to make the call. Cell phone companies originally developed this feature but have transitioned to government and law enforcement control. Wiretapping 

has become increasingly prevalent in the United States and was first implemented to target terrorist and criminal activity. Making a call is not private anymore, not only the government but also hackers and whoever else breaks into the surveillance system can listen to your call. One of the ways to deal with this is using a platform that is harder to wiretap. Platforms such as iMessage and facetime use an inscription method that is very hard to crack. Using these encrypted platforms makes it harder for law enforcement and hackers to access your private calls and messages. Another way that our society could deal with wiretapping is logging for better laws and regulations that prevent what platforms are wiretapped and who can access them. 

In conclusion, privacy and security technology upgrades have led to many Americans being vulnerable. Not only is your personal information gathered and stored without your knowledge, but your private phone calls can be listened to by many people. The only way to solve this problem is by spreading awareness of the situation. The more people understand that we have an issue, the more people that can be activists toward a solution. That solution could be more lobbying and protests for data control and surveillance. At the end of the day, people's data is harvested and stored without them even knowing, these advancements in technology have drastically changed the world of surveillance as we know it.