When you put your cell phone back into your pocket after sending a text or an email you probably do not think about who can see your messages. After all the message is on your device that is being carried in your pocket so nobody else can see it right? Turns out this isn't right at all.
Andy Yen's TED Talk Think Your Email is Private? Think Again explains how the meaning of privacy has changed since the world has become so involved with technology. For instance, every message, call, and email are all stored by data collectors and that data never goes away and can be read by anyone who has access to that data source. Yen states that privacy just is not accessible through communicating on a device without doing some tech-savvy work to your computer.
The ones with the most power to listen to our calls and views our messages are the phone companies themselves. Christopher Soghoian's TED Talk How to Avoid Surveillance...with the Phone in Your Pocket explains how phone companies have now built surveillance systems into the core of their networks. Yes these surveillance systems are used by people to protect us. But we live in a dangerous world with some dangerous people. These systems can be wire tapped pretty easily by criminal hackers who can easily get access to your calls and messages if they can hack in properly. But a big problem with these surveillance systems built by these phone companies is that the government does not have direct access to the system. We all know one of the ways the government solves criminal cases is by going through phones. But the government can't directly listen to that phone call that plans an act of terrorism or a drug deal as those calls go through the phone company first. The big question is not really whether or not our phones keep our privacy but are privacy systems doing enough?
| Surveillance is a complicated wire-tapping system used by phone companies. But in the dangerous world we live in you never know who is actually intercepting your data. |
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