Com Law and Lit

  My Not So Social, Social Media Ever since I started using the internet, my parents have instilled the values in me to be cautious of what I put online, since it will be out there forever. Obviously, being a 10 year old kid when I started a Facebook account, I was extremely worried about the things I said and liked because of my parent's influence. Thus, I generally only played awful Facebook games to pass the time. Now, I can't thank my parents enough for making me afraid because of the collecting of data Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. conducts on their consumers. I remember how terrifying it was the first time I got a targeted ad: it was for an Xbox controller after just looking up on amazon the price of one. After this event, I have been extremely careful about using a VPN, what browser I use, and what search engine I use. How Large is my Online Footprint? Today, I own a Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and a LinkedIn. However, I hardly ever use any of these services for

  Whistleblowers Summary For this blogpost, I am going to to discuss what I learned from Julia Mays' presentation on whistleblowers. Before her presentation, the only time I heard the term "whistleblower" was in reference to Edward Snowden, who released the information about the government illegally spying on American citizens. Whistleblowers are necessary in our society, especially today, to expose the corruption of governments/corporations who are abusing their employees, exploiting deals, or conducting illegal activities (like surveillance), on its consumers/people. What I found particularly interesting about the negatives of a whistleblower is that is revolves around the retaliation from companies. As Julia points out, whistleblowers " will most likely lose their job and other companies may be hesitant to hire that person due to their loyalty,". This fact is sadly what deters people from exposing corruption since the person knows that they will lose their li

  Total Information Awareness What is it?  Total Information Awareness, otherwise known as Terrorism Information Awareness, was a 240 million dollar program created after the tragic event of 9/11 in order to prevent terrorist attacks from happening in the future ( privacysos ). The TIA used predictive policing to connect specific information about an individual in order to anticipate and prevent an act of terrorism.  They collect, “government records of all kinds and individuals' medical and financial records, political beliefs, travel history, prescriptions, buying habits, communications (phone calls, e-mails and Web surfing), school records, personal and family associations, and so on,” ( aclu ). Terrifyingly, this gave the government complete access to everything about a person, allowing for a digital profile of an individual to be made that predicted their patterns within their day to day life. Through these developed patterns, the government was able to hypothesize exactly whe

 Privacy is Dying I have always been skeptical about putting personal information online, as well as conscious about the risks involved with sharing my life with the world. Recently, Google is being sued for 5 billion dollars for tracking and taking "potentially embarrassing" information while its user was in incognito mode. According to Ethan Baron,  " Google continues to track, collect, and identify their browsing data in real time, in contravention of federal and   state laws  on wiretapping and in violation of consumers' rights to privacy," ( Baron ). Obviously, this is  terrifying and fear-inducing for the millions of people that use Google chrome, having their every click tracked and site visited stored away on a computer somewhere. In addition, the level of invasion is equivalent  to having one's home invaded, trashed, and completely robbed. Google chrome itself my not store your activity, but its ad manager and analytics will track what you do. Then,