Week 5 EOC: The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

Technology and data are all the rage. It's everything, life itself to some. Many businesses rely on it, schools, law enforcement, even our government relies on it. With a culture evolving of "sharing," there is a lot of personal data being passed around. Many people feel comfortable sharing intimate details of their life on the internet. There are a few holdouts that still wont, but most do. They do this because they feel a strange sense of security, because if it is posted on a site like Facebook, or emailed, texted, or browsed in the comfort of their own home, that it is safe. Somehow more secure. Employers will even go to the extent to hire a research firm to identify employees who have serious issues in their personal lives as evidenced by messages posted on their social networking sites or who are shirking on-the-job based on the amount of time they spend logged in to different Web sites. But data mining is proving that even browsing in the comfort of your own home that business, Facebook, Google and the government all have the legal right to collect and store information about you through your web usage. Supposedly, the information is anonymous, but the question remains: Is this ok?

When the data is being collected and only used for terrorrisim, I do not mind. Quite honestly, what does it matter? People worry about the government keeping "dick pics" and sexting texts, but why does the government care about your dick pic? Plain and simple, they don't. Like in the"Last Week Tonight" segment, the issue lies when the data is transfered overseas. The only personal information I am concerned about is information that can be used by theives.

Now, when it concerned for-profit companies,that is a different story. I believe it is invasive for them to monitor you personal activities for financial gain. If you are going to take my information, at the very least, I would like to be informed of when it is being monitored or taken. Unfortunatly, It seems as if this trend is not slowing down. Accoring to an EE Times article, "That trend will only accelerate in the current age of mobile devices and in the emerging age of the Internet of Things. If you look closely at the apps running on your mobile smartphone device, odds are good that what you think is running locally is actually being executed elsewhere on servers in the cloud. Similarly, in the Internet of Things, MCU-based devices are so severely constrained in terms of power and local resources, they will be dependent on external data and software resources for an array of ongoing, back-and-forth network transactions: device to device, device to cloud, and cloud to cloud."

I think if the files are used to improve our lives, then all the better. But when it is being used just to solicit advertising, that is when it bothers me a bit. All this tracking has gotten out of hand. In a Daily News article, Facebook admits to tracking people who don't even use the site!
"Facebook recently admitted that its social plugins added tracking cookies to some people's computers, even if they didn't have a profile with the social site. Richard Allan, Facebook's vice president of policy in Europe, says the tracking is due to a bug that is currently being fixed."

It doesnt just end with your computer. They are even tracking your browsing via cell phone. Verizon apprarently has a "super cookie" it uses to collect data from its customers. In a Fierce Wireless article, it states "The FCC is investigating whether Verizon Wireless' program that inserted an undetectable and undetectable tracking ID into its subscribers' mobile Internet browsing activity violates consumer privacy laws.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler sent a letter to Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) about the matter on March 23, and the letter was made public yesterday. In the letter, Wheeler notes that carriers have access to very sensitive personal information about their customers, including call details, billing data, location information and information on customers' mobile devices.... The practice, which AT&T Mobility had engaged in but stopped last fall, sparked a backlash over fears that the program could be used by the carriers or advertisers to build up a profile of a users' mobile Web usage. The program was dubbed a "super cookie" because it is more powerful than a regular Web tracking cookie that users can delete. The programs were first disclosed in October 2014 and in November AT&T stopped adding it to its users' mobile browsers."