Technology: How it Hinders Our Liberty
- haruhiambernoaki
- May 2, 2016
- 9 min read
Technology is one of the greatest inventions of our time. It is part of our daily lives. Technology has become so advanced, we’ve began to create artificially intelligent programs and robots. Most of us believe it can help us more than it can hurt us. But what if you knew the ways technology hindered our lives, you may rethink the way technology exists. For example, the internet and its vast abilities. We use it everyday, people can go stir crazy if they do not have wifi connection. We have a semi heart attack when we see we only have two bars of connection instead of the full connection. But the internet is a very dangerous place. Everything digital can be seen or found. Technology hinders our personal and social liberty by allowing everything to be permanent and traceable and accessible to anyone. We are always told to be cautious of what you post on the internet but even our personal information that may not be public rather on digital documents and etc can be accessed by the government.
Most people are pro technology. They see it as a tool to help live better lives. It is known that technology helps us to be more efficient and smarter. Of course it has helped us in many ways. It makes our lives easier some say, which to an extent may be true. For example, phone applications or “apps” have become important to our daily routines. “There’s an app for that” is a saying we all hear nowadays. There are apps for computing, communicating, gaming and even books, the possibilities are endless. Apple’s App Store has multiple categories of apps, these categories include entertainment, finance games, health and fitness, music, and news. It has made communicating effortless with phone applications for texting, calling, and video calling. It is now possible to talk to someone from overseas and make long distance calls within seconds without the expensive costs. If you need to add, subtract, multiply or divide with just a couple clicks on your phone, you will have your answer. You can even do more advanced calculation by downloading applications that have characteristics of a graphing calculator. Trying to be smart with your money? There’s an app for that. Under the financing category you can find multiple apps that can help manage and keep track of your money. On the internet, which is also accessible by mobile phones, we can find answers in seconds using search engines rather than finding and reading through books and printed articles and etc. Using the internet on your phone you can check and reply to your important emails on your morning commute to work. Recent technology even makes it possible to tap your phone on a card reader as a method of payment. Anything can be accessible by the technology of mobile phones.
Of these application categories are social networking, such a FaceBook, Twitter and Instagram. Social media has been adopted into our society by generations, young and old. Mainly because of how simple it is to create an account and how you can interact with anyone you like; friends, family, coworkers, and even strangers. But social networking has its risks. Anything written on the internet is permanent, therefore you have to be mindful of what you post. Although social media is an outlet that allows us to write freely our thoughts, it should be understood that once you allow your personal emotions and thoughts to become public, you are forfeiting those said rights.
Having said this, it is important that the personal information given to these companies are protected. Each company has a database with the user’s personal and private information. This information is vulnerable to invasion by attacks like social networking infrastructure, malware and phishing attacks. The three basic security attacks are categorized as privacy breach, passive attacks and active attacks. Privacy breach refers to linking the nodes and edges and identifying the relation between them. Passive attacks are completely anonymous and unforeseen. Active attacks essentially create new nodes and attempting to connect to linked nodes as well as gaining entrance to other nodes (Kumar N, S.). It is the company’s responsibility to protect the obtained information. If this personal information were to be found and seen, it breaches all confidentiality and privacy. Not only that but it could also lead to dangerous situations like identity theft and stalking.
Of course these companies give you the options and settings to making your account “private”. Restricting visibility, blocking spam or other users, and controlling who can message you are options to help secure your account. Hackers can easily access not just a single account but the whole database and leak private information. Social analysts and developers have and are still attempting to create a safeguard to protect from these vicious attacks but doing so has become a difficult task (Kumar N, S.).
Recently social media has been used as a war weapon. An example of this is explained in an article from Popular Science called “The War of Social Media” by Emerson Brooking and P.W. Singer. The article describes the attack of an Iraqi City, Mosul, by the militia known as ISIS. As they were beginning to attack, ISIS also created a Twitter hashtag, #AllEyesOnISIS. This created havoc throughout the Arab World. ISIS’s strategy is to use social media to gain followers around the world from the privacy of their own homes. This led to the attack on the Bataclan theater, located in Paris, by gunmen as well as the massacre at a holiday party by a co-worker and his wife in San Bernardino, California (Brooking).
Obviously, this shows the effect social media has on people. Social networking being used as a war weapon is becoming more evident due to ISIS’s wrong doings. These social media attacks can create chaos and pandemonium all over the world, uncertain of who will be physically attacked next. The fact that these media outlets are accessible to anyone is alarming. Anyone, even young children, can see this which can create fear where it should not be. This is another reason social networking sites should be safely guarded or monitored to reduce the chance of these media attacks.
Technology can be accessed easily by hackers. Last year the U.S. News Online published an article by Geoff Mulvihill. This article describes Vladimir Drinkman who had pleaded guilty to the offense of a major hacking scheme. Drinkman sent malware into computers of big corporations. By doing this he was able to acquire personal information of multiple individuals including their credit card numbers. After obtaining this information Drinkman removed the malware so companies would not know they were hacked. Drinkman successfully hacked into several companies, including Heartland Payment Systems Inc. This company, which is based in Princeton, handles and process credit cards for small and medium-sized businesses. More 100 million card numbers were taken from Heartland Payment Systems Inc. As the final step to his scheme, Drinkman then proceeded by selling these card numbers to people who use the information to creating counterfeit credit cards with the use of magnetic strips.
Similar schemes include the use of a skimmer. A skimmer is an electronic device that scans credit cards and stores information to be used at a later. This breach of privacy can lead to identity theft as well as losing large amounts of money with no return. This is especially hard to detect because people wave around their credit cards everyday. Almost every American owns a credit card and makes purchases with it. Many schemes that require the use of a skimmer are led by a single criminal posing as a waiter, waitress, or cashier. When it comes time to give up your credit card to pay, the criminal may leave, scan it inconspicuously and give it back. It is almost impossible to detect that you have been hacked until it is too late.
Technology is also used to process personal and other forms of private information. This can be described in an article titled “Technology as a Threat to Privacy: Ethical Challenges to the Information Profession” by J.J. Britz, a professor of Information Science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “Although technology has a major impact on the gathering, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information its main ethical impact relates to accessibility/inaccessibility and the manipulation of information. It creates the possibility of wider as well as simultaneous access to information. By implication, it becomes easier to access a person's private information by more people” (Britz). Britz also describes ways using technology has impacts our lives such as electronic monitoring. This is also known as electronic eyes which are used in the workplace. This is a breach of privacy, even if it is in the workplace. It is even said that this practice can also lead to the fear of constantly watched, known as the panopticon phenomenon. Databanking, or merging of databases containing personal information, is also an issue when it comes to privacy. Individuals do not know the purpose of these databases being integrated, the effects of the merging, as well as who it benefits with the merge. The practice of databanking may also alter the information making it questionable whether or not the information is accurate.
Another way technology can hinder our freedom is when looking for jobs. Our social media is judged when applying for jobs. Corporations, are allowed to search up any candidate for a job and use anything they see as a factor to discard or place the applicant for the job. Our personal, as in nonwork related, accounts are rummaged through. These corporations can chose to do a thorough check. This can mean your entire history on your social media account can be inspected. This can result in our personal lives being shown to multiple corporate leaders. It is questionable whether our personal social lives should even be looked at when applying for jobs. Of course a routine background check and calling prior employers are necessary but apart from that, social media is not an important factor to look at when hiring an applicant.
Government audits are also a breach in our personal liberties. Audits are official inspections of an individual’s accounts. This may be caused by the suspicion that the individual is doing something illegal. But unless it is known for sure that the individual did in fact act against the law, it is a breach in privacy. This is individual may not be doing anything wrong at all but the smallest suspicion can cause an audit to be placed. Unless it is an eminent threat to society or themselves, there is no reason to look through and individual’s private accounts.
Government tracking is a massive breach in privacy. Since February of 2011 the Department of Homeland Security has been surveilling social media sites. The agency has been flagging users that post using words from the watch list they have created. This watch list, created by the Department of Homeland Security, includes hundreds of words and phrases which are organized by category. Being flagged may result in a further investigation of the user. This isn’t breaching privacy just yet but this can result in more serious social media monitoring such as the government accessing our direct or personal messages from these sites.
To speak fairly, the government is doing this for our own protection from cyber attacks and terrorists. And after the recent attacks by ISIS using social media, this strategy seems like the reasonable responds in order to prevent a future attack. Of course this action is helping us detect premature terrorists. But in order to protect the privacy of social media users, this practice should be altered to a way where our social and personal liberties are not hindered.
“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both,” a quoted by one of the Founding Fathers of our country, Benjamin Franklin. This quotes speaks so loudly and so truthfully. As Benjamin Franklin states our freedom is important. This freedom includes our right to privacy. Technology is only hindering our society because of its ability to be accessed or hacked by any person or the government. Anything written publically on the internet is permanent. People should be aware and cautious of their postings. These posts can be discovered by the government, therefore any post or personal information linked to your account can be used against us, even if we do not mean any harm. Even when applying for a job our personal social media can be seen. Anything these employers do not like can be a component to be dismissed. Technology is always traceable and anything we personally access can be viewed as well. This contorts the idea of freedom and liberty, we are able to speak our free mind but we will be surveilled according to our activity, which will be monitored. The issues is the accessibility of information as well as the manipulation of it. When and if it comes to handling private and personal information, practical guidelines should be written to respect our ideas of freedom and human rights.
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