Privacy Online and Off

There are several ways that privacy violations affect me and my family or friends. One example is that they put me at risk for being incorrectly labeled. In violations of privacy, the government will often overstep, tracking all types of information about an individual. One potential consequence of this we discussed in class is that it can cause an individual to be incorrectly labeled as dangerous. For instance, in some cases, people can end up on no-fly lists for airlines because they have been unjustly labeled through government tracking as being a dangerous individual. Although this has never happened to me directly, privacy violations affect me and my family because they put us at potential risk for these situations. 

Privacy violations also affect me and my family though threatening our civil liberties. In the United States, we have a Constitutional right to privacy, and excessively tracking an individuals data leaves our Constitutional protections threatened. For instance, one of the videos talked about police officers scanning license plates and keeping information about where people are driving, when, and with who. This overstep of surveillance affects everyone, as we have a right to keep our personal lives private. 

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To combat the dangers of privacy violations, the government should create stricter laws limiting the extent to which companies can track and sell an individual's data or personal information. There should also be strong regulations surrounding government surveillance. For instance, laws should be created to outlaw the government from listening to phone calls of noncriminal citizens. Regulations should also be placed to stop police officers from storing unnecessary information about noncriminal drivers and where or with who they are traveling. Rules such as these should be implemented because it is important to protect the citizens of the United States, both from things such as identity theft, and also to protect our Constitutional right to privacy.

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There are many steps we can take to protect ourselves from an invasion of privacy. For instance, as a society we can lobby for stricter laws regulating how much of our personal information private companies are able to track or sell. As many invasions of privacy come from the government tracking lawful citizens, we can also push for stricter rules controlling how much of our personal lives and information the government is allowed to track or store. When on the internet, we can use a virtual private network (VPN) to help protect our privacy and insure our information is not accessed by third-party sources. Along with this, we can use good passwords to help protect from an invasion of privacy. Another action we can take is clearing our computer's cache, which will help decrease the ability of sites to continue to track our data.