The issue of our personal privacy and emerging technologies
is a growing one that we are all going to have to face in coming years. Through
social media , online banking, and over all smart phone use we make ourselves
open and vulnerable to new ways of people abusing our openness. In class today
the topic of microchips being embedded into humans for tracking purposes.
However , agreeing with the majority of the class , I am dead against them. I
think that it is another classic way of our government dipping into our
personal privacy just because they do not think that citizens will make a big
deal out of it. We have been slowly groomed over the past ten years or so to
make our private lives open to anyone who will pay attention to it.
Particularly with my generation , starting with Myspace. We began Myspacing at
the tender impressionable age of eleven. We began to spend a lot of our time on
the internet becoming master web page designers and communicating with people
from Lord knows where. From that point forward we moved on to Facebook, Twitter
, and Instagram. It seems like with each
new social media sight ,the more intrusive it became. We went from simply
making a status about once a day to making several statuses a day. We then
migrated to Instagram where not only could you share a status , but you have to
upload a picture that in a lot of instances tell your exact location. So for
the newest technology to be “enchipping” humans is not at all surprising. I do
not know if it is my natural human instinct to be weary of the unknown , but I
do not feel that the good is going to out way the bad in this scenario. However
, it brings us back to the discussion of whether or not technology is ethically
neutral or not. I still feel that technology is ethically neutral , but I think
that a technology of that sort would most definatley end up in the wrong hands.
Embedding chips inside of humans just sounds like something out of a Distopian Science
Fiction novel where everyone’s most valuable information would very easily get
into the wrong hands. Then , of course , the information would be used for total world
domination.
To begin with, I totally agree with everything that you said. I think the government and the media work together to manipulate society. The more that we are viewed as a "collective," the more we lose our individual rights. As a culture we are being taken advantage of because of our dependence on social media. This issue has even been addressed in the media with George Orwell's "1984" and currently, the film Furious 7. In Furious 7, a computer program called God's Eye uses digital devices to find people anywhere in the world. If I am not mistaken, I believe all you have to do is type the person's in the program and it would immediately find the person. I think that could be useful because it might cut down on crime, but at the same time it is scary because privacy will cease to exist.
ReplyDelete"The government" does own or operate Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or banks... people do! I agree with a lot of your worries here, but I wonder if big corporations should be the target, not "government."
ReplyDeleteI feel like both of them could be targeted for different reasons, but we also have our own fair share of blame. Social media makes it easy for us to share too much of our lives, but we do have control over what we do and don't post. For example, do you really need to take a picture of every restaurant you go to? Do you really need to take a selfie five times a day and post it? Yes, an eleven year old would probably do all of these things, but that's a young impressionable mind just like Kelsie said. They're young, curious, and they've just been handed a shiny new toy that they have yet to fully understand. People our age should understand the use of location settings on your phone (it's really just a button you turn on or off, that's it), on your social media accounts, even Google lets you turn off your location in your settings. I'm not saying that means they have no idea of what our location is or that it keeps them from accessing our information, but we do have the ability to keep our lives from being too publicized on social media. And the government, or at least a group of people within the government, are also partially to blame for the loss of privacy. Social media made it possible to gather all of this personal data, social media is the one benefitting from selling our information like what we discussed in class, but a certain congressional officer was the one that wrote a document allowing all citizens' personal records to be recorded and searched without fully informing them. This was voted on without anyone fully considering what it means to record and search citizens' personal information, and they definitely didn't properly inform citizens. I'm pretty sure that America would have been more ambivalent or even hostile towards the Patriot Act if they'd known it would give the government access to their cell phone conversations, emails, texts, and social media accounts (even the ones where you're supposedly anonymous!) and leave them no way to secure these from government invasion.
ReplyDeleteBeing microchipped is just plain wrong in my opinion. You can easily shut off facebook and myspace with a click of a button. But if you are chipped then you can't. The government will technically be able to control you. Eventually being microchipped will turn sour. It is kind of like selling your soul to the government of something. The idea of it just makes you not want to trust it.
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