Privacy in the Digital Age

 I have been aware for a long time of the issues of privacy online and how we are never truly safe from government surveillance. While I did not find anything in the TED talks surprising I do think they are all important issues to address. I do nothing on the internet that could cause me harm in the future because I understand once something is out there you can never take it back. It's one thing to give information to a website like your email or phone number, but like the videos talk about there are much larger problems when companies take information you do not give them. 

Any one of these issues could affect anyone you know, but the one that certainly affects everyone is the fact that every message or call you send or receive can be tracked. In the video, the speaker says Apple phones are more secure than others because they are harder to tap, but that does not mean impossible. It means if the Chinese government or our own government wants to they will hear every conversation you ever have. Even with an iPhone, Siri is always listening (see attached article). The ability for your phone to passively listen to every conversation you have can supposedly be turned off, but I think if you mention multiple times in a week you need new shoes you will receive ads on every type of social media you use. Companies can say this is just targeted ads and that they aren't really eavesdropping on you, and the reason they can get away with it is because the government is also listening. 

The government should mandate all technology companies to ban listening technology without it being manually activated, but like I said earlier they cannot do that because they use the same technologies. What they can do is try harder to create a national type of security that prevents foreign governments from also spying on us. Each government around the world tries to spy on each other as briefly touched on in the video about government surveillance. This leads to other countries constantly keeping tabs on one another with all the information they can get their hands on. As citizens, we often are caught in the crossfire of this spying as foreign governments might harvest our information as it is more readily available than American secrets heavily encrypted with the best technology. 

One method of protection that can be used is a VPN or virtual private network as it can display a different IP address from your real location and even display you in another country. They also can cause a strain

on your connection and costs money for a subscription, which is why I as a broke college student no longer use one after my free trial. This kind of technology can protect you from hackers trying to steal your information and could in theory do the same for government surveillance. Ultimately the best way to protect yourself is to make sure you never do anything stupid on the internet and never give unnecessary information out for free.