Apr 28, 2016

Surveillance and Your Life

The world loves knowing everything going on in an individual’s life and knowing their secrets. This is not a balanced issue. Someone gets upset when their information or secrets get out, but also get upset when a friend or someone does not tell them their secrets. Will the world have balance with privacy? And can we keep our secrets hidden? Although you have your social media and accounts set to private really think about how private and secure they are. The Circle by Dave Eggers shows how our lives are not private and what others may be doing to get into our personal life and how they cover it by saying it is for scholar reasons to help learn.

Everything we search or click on is recorded to a hard drive. People hack into phones and computers every day and steal important information to bank accounts to other ways where one can get bullied if linked out. To help explain how scary surveillance is becoming is The New York Times when stating that In Dave Eggers’s new novel, “The Circle,” Big Brother isn’t the government: it’s a Google-like, Facebook-like tech behemoth, called the Circle, that has a billion-odd users, controls 90 percent of the world’s searches and aspires to record and quantify everything that’s happening to everybody, everywhere in the world. Although he uses fear as a technique to persuade his readers to cut back on social media and the internet in general, he also uses humor and really connects with his audience to build a common ground with.

The Buffalo News expresses their feelings on what privacy is to them by saying Privacy is essential to our humanity. It permits us to create and maintain private lives from which spring personal identity, self-determination, freedom and, ultimately, happiness. So why does so many people want to disrupt someones privacy, their sense of peace? It is an addiction. And with well-known companies using the its for research and growing purposes they are getting away with it. Google also uses their Google Maps as a tool to get every location and gather by-standers near them without consent. Buildings have cameras covered on all walls, Police officials are now aloud to have body cameras on them at all times. Plate scanners will allow police to keep tabs on us and may tell mall operators every time we pull into their parking lots — as was the case in New Jersey before being stopped by public outcry. A video was found to help show the concerns,

You would think you can only get privacy at home. Wrong, hackers can get into your webcam and see everything you are doing through your own camera. When you log into a social media you instantly get into the world of everyone knowing your personal life. Your phones can be hacked into easily and are used as a tracking device. Apple isn’t alone, every tech company seems to be developing smart watches, smart glasses, and other health and life-style monitoring devices. (Well, almost every tech company … we haven’t heard from Michael Dell, but perhaps he’s too busy keeping his almost-private company out of Carl Icahn’s clutches.)

In conclusion, the world needs to take a step back and really look into surveillance not only for their well being but for their family and their security. With technology growing and individual’s knowledge on hacking the world will fall into a unsafe place to live and we will see many more cases of Dave Eggers Mercer tragic encounter.