Sunday, February 2, 2025

Privacy

Privacy is a major issue today, with the amount of information about people readily available to anyone, with a wide variety of intentions.

How do these issues affect you? Your friends and family?

Part of the problem is that, most likely, it won't. People aren't speaking out about these issues not because the information isn't available, but because the average person is not going to be given any reason to care. Like for the license plate issue, millions of Americans are going to have their license plates read and stored every day and are never going to know the difference. It's only when the data gets leaked, used for discrimination, or any other blatant issues that the average person will start caring. There are things people can do, though, as a county in Virginia has already ruled that license plate data can only be stored if it pertains to an ongoing investigation. Others could also follow suit if they took the opportunity.



What should the government be doing about these issues?

This one is interesting because, truth be told, I thought the laws about this were a lot stricter than they actually are. I was really surprised to hear that, for all intents and purposes, revenge porn is perfectly legal. I thought for sure that it would fall under defamation or similar laws. Your only shot at dealing with it is civil suits, which are extremely demanding both time and money wise to pursue, and thus not a route everyone can afford to take. So, I'd definitely agree that passing the law that criminalizes it is a must.



What can we do to protect ourselves from invasions of our privacy?

There is only so much people can do to protect their privacy online. I could give the generic spiel about being careful about what you post online and what people should have access to sensitive information about you, but that shouldn't be the whole answer either. People should be able to post about what they want online, without having to sanitize their lives out of fear of how that information could be used against them. 



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