Remember, You Are Always Being Watched

Watching these Ted Talks about electronic devices and the effect they have on our lives was a big eye-opener to hear. Many of us know how dangerous it is to post things on social media because of future jobs, but I don't think people realize the extent to which we are being observed. All of the Ted Talks correlated together because each one had a different focus on how we are being observed. The one that really caught my attention was the idea of how every one of us is plastered by electronic tattoos. The idea of that concept is so accurate and realistic. You can take a picture of someone at the bar and zoom in on someone's face in the background and immediately use face recognition to find out everything about them. It is scary how much power and access we all have through social media and facial recognition. This shows how careful you have to be because one single post can lead to such long term damage in your future. The video discusses this idea that all of us are very close to immortality because these tattoos will live far longer than our actual bodies will because of our electronic tattoos.

Another Ted Talk focused on the whole idea of how our location is constantly being tracked and put into a database. The government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors and where you are at all times. Mass location tracking is constantly happening when we are driving through cameras that capture pictures of our license plates. Every time we pass a street camera it captures a picture of our license plate that goes into a data system. Law enforcement agents can discover anything about their location in multiple ways. The government is able to know where we have been and who we have been with at all times by just pulling up our data. They can send tracking signals inside people's houses to identify cellphones. The surveillance you are under just never ends.

Computing has pretty much changed everything. Telephone companies put surveillance features into the very core of their networks. Our telephones and the networks that carry out our calls were wired for surveillance first and this upset the government officials because the tech companies have built encryption features and turned them on by default. Anyone that you're talking to, whether it's your mom or doctor, someone could be listening, not just our own government. Government officials believe that all communication should be available to the government and encryption is making that difficult. It is crazy to think that all of us use the same communication devices and everyone's' can be intercepted.

All of these examples exemplify how risky communication is and how much we are being observed in this world. Everything is out in the open and we don't even realize it. This is why it is important we are aware of what is being put out there and we stay informed on how our generation is evolving because technology is constantly getting better and better.