Media Law Post #10

 Ryan Smith

While everything from the TED Talk videos seem scary at first, when you step back and really think about it, there's really nothing to be afraid of if you're a law-abiding citizen who doesn't mad bad decisions. The one thing that did really upset me more than scare me was the fact that the government has hundreds of pictures of your license plate wherever you go during your everyday life "just in case". This angered me a bit because it completely forgets about and/or ignores the "innocent until proven guilty" principle, except it's even worse. That ideology is only for when someone is accused of doing something wrong. Taking dozens if not hundreds of photos of people's license plates when they are completely innocent just sounds extremely wrong. The fact that they save them "just incase they ever do something wrong" seems extremely predatory and takes away from your privacy.

Moving from an invasion of privacy to a protection of it, it's nice to hear that companies are making your calls and messages harder for anyone besides the intended recipient to discover. As Soghoian says, this is somewhat of a double-edged sword because this encryption of your calls and messages means that the government will have a harder time cracking down on criminals, but honestly this is the lesser of two evils as having all calls and messages encrypted is better than having none of them encrypted. Privacy when connected to technology is a very convoluted topic, where opinions seem to differ on what is right and wrong. Some may focus on their own security being as safe as possible, but other may want to make sure that criminals or other dangerous people are under high surveillance. It's unfortunate that we can't have both at the same time, so all we can do is make sure we're not doing anything wrong ourselves and being the best we can be.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Media Law & Literacy - Final Post

Image
 Ryan Smith Technology in Today's Time If someone were to ask me " Do you think your relationship with technology is healthy?", I would say yes. If we are judging the question by how I am right now, I would say my relationship with technology is healthy (although using that word in this sentence does seem a bit weird since I've never used it in that way before). I have absolutely no social media, and I only use technology for school, work, or hobbies which can factor into work like using the Adobe suite of products for video editing and graphic design. Overall, I think the technology we have is a net positive, but I think social media is a net negative, let me explain. The fact that you have a camera, internet browser, compass, navigation system, music player, and phone all inside your smartphone is unbelievable. Also the fact that you no-longer have to travel to a library and possibly spend money to rent out or buy material in order to find information is amazing. Th
Read more

Media Law Post #4

Ryan Smith When thinking about a current event to talk about for this post, I didn't want to cover something like the Black Lives Matter movement or the storming of the capitol as they seemed too far back and I wanted to talk about something very recent. The BLM movement was last year, and the storming of the capitol was in the very first week of this year, so I chose something going on in this current month, and that is the censorship of all holidays at schools. While this isn't a nationwide event at the moment, it very well could be in the future. Starting June 10th, 2021 every holiday in the academic calendar will be removed and be replaced with "day off" to prevent offending anyone. Not only does this cause confusion, but it's actively destroying freedom of speech in order to protect people's feelings. This culture that we've grown into is extremely detrimental to society because it teaches people to censor things they don't like so they never have
Read more

Media Law Post #5

Image
 Ryan Smith For my technology I'll be teaching about in my post, I wanted to talk about something that almost everyone if not everyone in the class has used, but may not know the history of or the inner workings of, that being the Nintendo Wii. The motion controller that gave the Wii its name did not have its origin in gaming, but instead in aeronautics. The technology was first developed by a company named Gyration, and was only pitched for gaming 2 decades after its creation. Funnily enough, just like Blockbuster refusing to buy out Netflix and later regretting that decision, the exact same situation happened when it came to the Wii. Tom Quinn, Gyration's CEO, pitched his technology to Steve Balmer, Microsoft's CEO at the time and he loved the idea, but the Xbox team felt the exact opposite, and the opportunity was lost for Microsoft. After the unsuccessful pitch to Xbox, Quinn pitched his technology to Sony, which had the same outcome. The Playstation team were also not
Read more