Privacy of Cell Phones or Lack there of

    Protecting one's privacy is key to ensuring human dignity, safety, and self-determination. It also allows individuals to freely develop their own personalities in this ever-changing world. Most importantly, I believe privacy is about the freedom to make choices without fear: like how you want to live, what you personally believe in, who your friends are, and what you want to share with whom. A lack of privacy leads to uniformity and self-censorship, which in turn pushes our opinions to the edges and erodes our ability to engage in healthy/normal debate. While watching Christopher Soghoian's Ted Talk, I was genuinely surprised that when first making phones but especially cell phones, the first priority was to have surveillance and the ability to track one's data. Additionally, it made me consider how this tracing has and will affect my family and me in the future. 

    Cell Phones track where you go, and what you do and reveal details about your life that prove quite valuable to the government and companies. I think even though this is the case, I see it in two ways. Firstly when I watch and read more about this topic, I get more concerned because I or someone in my family's identity can be stolen because of all this data stalking by these cell phone companies and the fact that one could take advantage of this, and certainly could ruin one's life. My other thought is sort of indifference to the tracking because, on a real-life scale, it doesn't really affect my family or me at all. From doing more reading on this topic, I have found that the main purpose of all this tracking is to use the data to give to companies, so they can sell you things. Along with finding evidence of criminals or threats against the country. My family and I are not threats against the country, so even though it can be scary to think about the fact that someone can always be listening/watching your activity on your phone, it doesn't really bother me because I don't have anything to hide. 

    As I said previously, if you ask the government why they do all this tracking, they will say that they do it to fight crime and protect public safety. Their mindset is that they have a clear and compelling need to access digital data and that it balances the interest against their citizen's expectation of due process and the rule of law that is essential to maintaining trust in technology. Putting that aside, I think the government can protect its citizens from identity theft by preventing unauthorized disclosures of personal information and letting individuals have the right to review such information, requesting corrections if wrong, and being informed of any disclosures. Lastly, I think you should take all the precautions to make stealing your identity as challenging as possible. You can do this by not putting sensitive information in an email, social media, or text messages, as well as creating strong passwords and keeping them secret from others. Also, you can protect your accounts and credit with certain applications out there that allow for more protection. Furthermore, you can boost your computer's security and add alerts to your bank account to make sure your accounts aren't being used.