Post 11: Privacy Issues Today

 There are a lot of sci-fi media about the great advancements that our technology will take in the distant future. Though there are a lot of fantasies about how much more convenient our lives will be, there are a number of dystopian stories about when technology goes too far. We are currently in an era where our devices all intermingle on the internet. They share web browsers, emails, contacts, credit card information, etc. At surface level, this seems like something convenient to have. However, we are unknowingly giving all of our information out to advertisement companies. All of our searches on Google, our activity on social media like Facebook, our recent purchase history on sites like Amazon, what we would say around Smart Speakers like Alexa, etc. What I just listed are companies built off services that are free to use. We often see these companies making great profits and their creators making billions. It's because these services sell our information to advertisers. These companies will try to figure out our interests and align them with our identities. They will send us links to products we might want and add more data according to our behavior around that. Our smartphones keep track of our location and speech, so these companies are given a lot of information about us to make assumptions. This information about data collection is kept hidden either in lengthy Terms of Conditions we will never read, or with changes to those policies we just don't get to read. Even though these companies use them with our convenience in mind, it is still an invasion of privacy. 

A story I believe is closer to reality is 1984 by George Orwell. In it, people were punished for showing too much emotion, a lot of their decisions were decided by the government, and any resemblance of independence was shut down with manipulation and brainwash. I drew this correlation with what is currently happening in China. Unlike with us, they don't get the choice to remove AI from their lives. Their streets are full of cameras with face recognition and they keep track of how each of their citizens follow traffic rules, what they buy, etc. This isn't used just for evidence, their behavior plays an active role in their credit score. Doing anything frowned upon will decrease it, and people with a high score will get access to more discounts in stores. It's like playing God with just cameras and AI. 2D recordings only show our 3D world from an angle. They can miss important details and hop on assumptions. Turkish Muslims in China would face great scrutiny because of the way they looked on the surface, like terrorists. That people could not live a normal life there with the discrimination. The scary thing about all of this is that China is one of top manufacturers of this AI technology and they have sold them to at least 58 countries already. A world full of this evil use of technology is a scary reality and with how technology improves quickly with time, our privacy is greatly threatened.