Leg 500

Individuals to Research Citizens’ Private Data

The first technology that I thought of for this assignment was phone tapping. This technology has been around for a very long time and is mostly used by authorized personnel, primarily government monitoring agencies, such as the National Security Agency (NSA).

According to my web research, phone tapping (also known as wiretapping) originated sometime in the 1890s. And it was only used by law enforcement agencies then. The technology became necessary to monitor and intervene in suspicious illegal activities. Back then,

tapping a phone line involved some form of physical labor. Today however, the advancement of both phone technology and wiretapping has evolved dramatically. Mobile devices even have Global Positioning Systems (GPS) installed in them thereby allowing and pinpointing the exact location of the device and the user of such device.

The second technology that I could think of was video surveillance. This technology came much later after the phone tapping technology. It is also known as closed-circuit television (CCTV) because video is not publicly transmitted, but rather mostly used for private monitoring. CCTV is used mostly in banks, airports, casinos, department stores, and quite frankly just about in any public area if you look around. The advances of this technology have made it where most of these devices are so small, that you wouldn’t know you were being “watched”! And while such devices are used primarily in public places, they can also be used in private locations such as one’s home, both in and outside.

The third technology, and the newest, is the Internet. The Internet is by far the largest network of information in the world. The most readily available private data on someone that

Running head: PRIVACY: THREE TECHNOLOGIES THAT CAN BE USED 4

can be found on the Internet is that of a convicted criminal. Most states have an online...