Blog #9 Data Privacy

Being naive can be blissful… the more you learn about your data and the information being collected on you the more you wish you didn’t know. Our rights to privacy are shrinking every minute you are online, or even just near technology. As a kid, I always thought my dad was being dramatic when he was telling me I couldn’t have social media like all the other middle schoolers, and when I finally did he was always so cautious about what I was doing and what I was posting. I get it now, he was not naive to the dangers and the information being collected on us. 

Our society's technology has only gotten more advanced and weaved into our lives than ever before. We leave a footprint everywhere we go, and companies and the government are taking advantage of that. A few years ago the State of South Carolina got into trouble for selling driver's licenses and driving history records of South Carolinians. The DMV made over 42 million dollars off of our information. Like Catherine Crump’s Ted Talk mentions the government takes photos of license plates, tracking everywhere you go. 

Tech companies have been working to encrypt their technologies to protect consumers, yet as Christopher mentioned in the TED talk he gave, the Chinese government hacked into those surveillance measures that were made available to our government in order to track which government agents they were tapping. Governments foreign and domestic have an interest in our data. 

So what is being done to protect our data? This is the question we all have to educate ourselves on in order to follow the best practices for protecting our data. Recently, I have done extensive research on the need for a comprehensive federal data protection law, currently, there are only a few states that have enacted this, but it should be a national standard to protect our right to privacy online. While this does not account for the countless other measures being done to track us it takes a step in the right direction.