Privacy- My Reaction To The Ted Talks

 After watching the numerous Ted Talks on different ways our privacy has been breached online, I  am in a way shocked and feel a sense of violation. There are many different pros to technology, but there are also many different cons. We can find these in numerous different types of technology. 

    Amazon's Alexa, for example is helpful with things such as turning things on and off in your smart home through a convenient voice command, asking a handsfree question, and with many other little things, but at that cost comes the surveillance of what goes on in your home and more importantly, the violation of you right. Think about it like this, if your Alexa device is always listening, waiting for the moment you say Alexa!, then we can infer that Alexa must always be listening. The issue here is that it doesn't end with Alexa, instead it begins with things such as Alexa or even "Hey Siri".  These things have proven themselves useful but they have also proven to bring about unwanted or unknown surveillance. It's not that you should be afraid of Alexa listening to what goes on in your home, it's just the fact that anything that does happen within the privacy of your own home is no longer private if technology is involved and that can be a litt
le scary. 

    These issues with technology impact anyone that is involved with technology which is lots of people. It impacts me, and most likely you as well. Some are quick to say the government should be involved with this in order to protect their citizens. With this issue, I go back and forth on what the government should do in this issue. You could either get rid of your devices, or you could ask and rely on these companies who to include encryption. A company that does a good job with this is Apple. Apple actually does not have access to any of their customers imessages or facetime calls according to this ted talk. 

    I think our government could help us to start with not allowing these companies to collect anything off of any user without that users consent. Although a device such as Alexa can always be listening for "Alexa", all the data recorded in the process of the waiting and beyond waiting should be legally required to be deleted and if not, that company must deal with legal punishment. Or these companies can include an encryption such as Apple did making these technologies significantly more difficult for just anyone to hack. I think that this could be a good start to the government getting involved with such technologies for our good. 

  However, if the government is not willing to get involved in order to protect their citizens, we can do a few things ourselves to help protect ourselves a little more. We can use the secure communication tools on our devices such as imessage, facetime, and whatsapp to safely and privately communicate with others.