Privacy, Online & Off

It's important to know what information you are putting out there.

 When talking about privacy it's very important to be aware of just how much privacy you have especially in today's world. The following blog post will contain my notes from a couple of TedTalks regarding privacy within the government. 

First the most important thing you might ask is how does this affect you or your family members. The answer is very simple it greatly affects them even if you think it doesn't. 

For instance, things like cell phone towers and license plate readers are used as mass collection devices that will track information on you specifically your movements. This type of information can help the government gain a detailed portion of how you act. 

 One of the videos we watched made a great connection on how it acts. If you use thinks like Facebook, Instagram, checking credit scores, or even checking your bank account your creating essentially what he called an electronic tattoo. 

privacy may not really be private

Many people know tattoos tell stories well so can an electronic tattoo and the more things you consume or use the more electronic tattoos you are covering yourself with. 

He used the saying that we would be close to immortality in that our electronic tattoos or profile will live far longer than we actually will. 

One thing that really shocked me was how companies have been able to take privacy invasion and turn it into a business model. The first step is contract adhesion that is a contract in which the party holds all the power. 

Secondly, and probably the biggest is data mining and this can be done many different ways through user generated which is things like giving out your personal information to simply making an Instagram post. 

Another form of data mining is tracking malware that would refer to things like cookies on a website or temporary internet files. 

Finally, the last form of data mining is deep packet inspection that can be things like stored email files, every bit of cell phone communication, keyword searching through your texts, emails, and phone calls. 

Know how they use your information

All of this information can be used to create what they would call a digital dossier which is all the information they gathered on you and basically making a whole profile on you. 

They use the tactic of behavioral marketing to also get you while it is a slight positive because it efficiently removes products that don't align with your interests. 

The biggest and probably the scariest is the Third-Party Doctrine - is a legal rule that leaves us all vulnerable, when the first party voluntarily gives info to a second party, the first party relinquishes all control over third party downstream uses. This essentially allows second party to give your info to third parties in which they could sell if off to scammers, spammers or even criminals. 

I've mentioned all this because it's important to know what you're sharing online because the information will always exist even if you try to delete it. 

AI Disclosure: No AI used in this blog post.