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Modern Technology, the Unseen Dangers Essay

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As time goes on, the world around us continues to change even more rapidly than it already has. All the time new gadgets and gizmos continue to be introduced to the market to satisfy the needs of the consumers. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter allow people from all over the world to be connected. With the help of these social networking sites and cell phones people have become more easily accessible in the previous years than ever before. At first glance these modern technologies appear to be nothing but helpful conveniences that society has become accustomed to having , but as technology advances, our privacy continues to decrease without most people even realizing it. Cell Phones, everyone knows what a …show more content…

This all seems like something you would find in a science fiction novel, but the possibilities of such things are happening right before our very eyes.
One example of technology getting the power to be able to locate you wherever you are is participatory sensing, “participatory sensing is research that uses mobile phones to collect data for personal or social projects” (Shilton, pg 52). There are many of these research studies going on but one in particular is currently under development at UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing it’s called the Personal Environmental Impact Report (PEIR). You might be wondering how PEIR and other participatory sensing projects could be putting your privacy in danger, well let me explain how the PIER project works. According to the PIER website (http://peir.cens.ucla.edu/) the participants in the PIER study walk around going about their normal day for weeks at a time with an application on their cell phones that calculates their exposure to air pollution and carbon footprints and by referencing GPS and cell towers, the phones upload participants’ locations every few seconds (Shilton, pg 52). This project is meant to help scientists in Los Angeles’s pinpoint where air pollution is the worst so that it can be reported on the news and so that special attention can be given to these areas. This information is uploaded to the Southern California weather database so that it can be reviewed but how can we

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