Blog #5 - Privacy

     In a world full of technology, privacy is essential for protecting yourself and those around you. Governments, hackers, and criminals alike all want your information. While there are ways to be safer, use VPNs, different communicating apps, or other strategies, ultimately, much of your information will already be put online due to lack of privacy given by major social media and communication companies. Staying private online, while difficult, is possible but requires avid attention and a willingness to potentially miss out on features that are more revealing towards your profile. 

    While I have not personally been hacked, I have been around friends whose Instagrams and TikToks get hacked and they lose total control of the account. Another frequent form of hacking is when hackers take photos from the persons profile and create an alternate profile. These fake profiles typically urge people to follow claiming they will start posting private content of the individual or they will post a link that make people looking at the account vulnerable to also getting hacked. These issues directly effect me, my family, and friends because these privacy issues pose a major threat to everyday life. There is always a chance that your Instagram, Snapchat, X, or other social media platform gets tapped into and you not only lose the account, but the hacker gains all posts, saved posts, and drafts from the app. Especially on an app like TikTok that allows you to make drafts (posts that don't get posted), privacy is crucial as many of those drafts are not made to be seen by the public eye. 

    In my opinion, the government should continue to take steps to make these apps more private. While it makes catching criminals and terrorists more difficult because you cannot tap into their messaging and socials, it gives the general public a higher sense of security and privacy. While Silicon Valley corporations continue to build encryptions making hacking more difficult, I think its important for our government to feed into this and help make increasing privacy a more pressing matter. By doing this, it also allows for the public to be safer from foreign governments as well, something that our government should for sure be fighting to accomplish. 

    While there are many steps to staying private online, I think the biggest one is to make your account private. Though this seems obvious, it is surprising how many accounts continue to stay public for no apparent reason. Being public on social media gives you a much higher likelihood of being hacked or kicked out of your account. Another recommendation would be not to answer spam calls, texts, or emails. We now live in a world where getting random calls, texts, and emails are extremely common, and answering these, even for fun, puts you at risk of data leaking or getting tricked and scammed.