Blog #7: Invasion of Privacy

What does privacy mean in the digital age? In a article titled "The Human Right to Privacy in the Digital Age," it states, "Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) protects everyone from arbitrary or unlawful interferences with their 'privacy, family, home or correspondence.'"  We see, though, from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, that our government has been secretly keeping surveillance on us. In a article about Edward Snowden's case, we see that "in 2013, Snowden revealed the existence of previously classified mass intelligence-gathering surveillance programs run by the U.S. National Security Agency." This of course surprised many Americans who did not know that their data was being collected. 

In my Media Law and Literacy class at High Point University, we watched a couple different TED talks with mainly the same message related to privacy. One of the TED talks explained to us what electronic tattoos are. Just as tattoos shout messages and tell stories so do our posts on, for example, Facebook, twitter, Instagram, even our google searches leave data to be collected that gives the government access and insight into who we are. Another TED talk video informed us on how even license place readers are being used to collect information on who we are. A license place reader does much more than track our speed, it saves our license plate in order to keep track of where we go. The government can at any moment look up detailed information on us simply by looking up our license plate. In another TED talk video we see how even "telephone networks carry calls wired with surveillance." Thus, someone could. be listing in on your phone calls collecting information on you. Even the Amazon Alexa has been known to collect data in the home. It has proven to "collect more data than any other smart assistant." 

What has happened to our First Amendment rights? Where is our protection for people like Edward Snowden who expose our government watching us? Our First Amendment is to protect free speech and protect privacy such as ones own property. This all affects us, friends, family, ect. because if our government is not even upholding a part of the constitution what else are they hiding from us that they are not upholding? How do we know we are safe? Safe to freely speak and to freely browse things like the internet without our every movement being tracked. I think our government should be doing something about American citizens concerns with privacy. I think our data should not be taken unless we give permission. There are some sites that ask permission for data usage, but data is still being collected. I think in order to protect ourselves from invasions of our privacy, we need to be careful what sites we are using, what information we are putting out there on social media. We must accept the fact that whatever we do on an electronic or even simply driving by a license place reader, is data being collected. There are data protection plans put in place that we can take advantage of. However, we live in a new and ever changing world dependent on technology. Technology keeps advancing and we are helping it advance by the collection of our data.