Yahoo’s recent willingness to scan the incoming email of its customers for specific information identified by the U.S. government has aroused the sleeping dragon known as privacy rights. With the rise in such acts that undermine the right to our own information, the idea of an omnipresent government surveillance seems closer by the day, a chilling fact. Here’s how they’re doing it.
Edward Snowden’s high-profile leak of the United States National Security Agency’s (NSA) secret surveillance program (which happens to be the biggest theft of American secrets), was the spark that set the fire going. According to the leaked documents, the NSA intercepts the communications of over a billion people worldwide and tracks the movement of hundreds of millions of people using cellphones.The bad news? America is not the only obsessed mom wanting to know where her son is all the time.
The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States that cooperatively shares information captured from radio and radar signals (like Wifi), making it way easier to monitor you – and me – who is now in danger from writing this. Apart from governments and their ‘need-to-know-everything’ approach, we also have companies that exploit our right to privacy.
One of those companies is the internet giant (and the one who answers every question we ask in less than 2 seconds) Google. The multinational tech giant monitors personal email messages from your Gmail account – scanning them in order to deliver targeted ads to you. Their policies also allow unlimited period of data retention – which would mean that information collected and stored by Google can be kept by them for as long as they want. What do they do with this information? Well your guess is as good as mine.
Though the extent to which our privacy is violated is not as outrageous as in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, it will not be long before the Big Brother comes into being; a group of elites who will know when you walk, talk, sleep, sh*t, and whatever goes on in your life – including your future plans.
Many tech personalities will give you advices to prevent being spied on, such as blocking the laptop camera, installing an antivirus program, using a VPN service, creating strong passwords and also managing your cookies. Here at CAMPUS, we suggest the best way to have some privacy is to simply live under a rock.
