As technology continues to advance, most Americans are becoming increasingly concerned over their privacy. Banks and financial institutions send out notices concerning the amount of information they are sharing with other organizations. The wording on these notices attempts to soothe us into accepting their claim that they would do nothing to invade our privacy, when in fact they are releasing information that is anything but innocuous.
Few people are aware of how many ways companies and private individuals can invade their privacy. If you have been on the Internet for a long period of time, various sources will have accumulated a vast amount of information about you, and it doesn’t take a hacker to gain possession of this information. None of us intend to lay bare every tiny detail of our existence, but we do, a crumb at a time in emails to our friends or things we post on forums. None of it ever goes away and will be there for employers searching you out after you put in your résumé.
Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room for my first visit, I noticed the young woman at the reception desk was spending a long time at her computer. Thirty minutes later when I talked to the doctor’s nurse, she asked me some questions that she could only have known from an Internet search. Nothing alarming, but enough to make me aware of the ease in which people can find that elusive piece of information they are seeking.
Government law enforcement agencies can locate you anywhere if you are carrying a cellular phone by pinging your phone and triangulating the response through three different towers. Congress is demanding answers concerning a piece of software installed on iPad. It is alleged to contain an application that will track and record your every movement. It will only be a matter of days until hackers will be able to access this from their phone and track where you have been at any moment of the day or night. To me that is a little scary. The stalkers are, no doubt, waiting in line for access to this new application. Click on the title to this article and it will carry you to an article on the investigation by certain congressional members.
2 comments:
It's more than a "little" scary, Joe. It is odious in the extreme. But I am afraid there is no way it can be stopped. The authorities have long since demonstrated that they are no more bound bu the law than your local bank robber. All the have to do is cite "national security," and the average American falls in lockstep with any depredation on individual privacy they cook up.
It's an old song with a new tune, as far as I'm concerned, frankly, and I had no doubts that the internet would be utilized in this way. Just makes it that much easier for anyone - be they the government, identity thieves, or marketers - to keep track of us. They used to spy on people in person, then they got phone taps, now they've got the E-Z pass. Makes me want to go live in the woods.
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