Snapchat's Surveillance: A Critical Analysis

Alexa is a voice recognition device that listens to the owners commands and answers back to them. It is used for a variety of reasons: Weather, music, reminders, and much more. But more and more people have been questioning whether or not Alexa is listening to more than what she is supposed to hear. The device will listen when it hears its queue , which is “Alexa”, yet there has been situations where police have come to Amazon to collect information of what it has heard regarding crimes. Since people are buying these devices and willingly placing them in their homes, why not use them as a government spying device? “These are not potential listening devices. They are listening devices- that is why they exist. And if a hotel-room pone can be rigged as a listening device for other than its original purposes, why not something built to listen all the time?” (Gerald Sauer). Amazon’s Alexa was built to listen to people talk and answer what their commands. If government hacked the device to listen to people, no one would ever know, which is why it is similar to the hidden microphones in Orwell’s novel. The microphones were secret listening devices hidden all over, to make sure no citizens were breaking any laws. They listened to every word someone said and no one ever knew when they were being

A Surveillance Society by Thompson and Hickey is about how public surveillance is everywhere, looking at everything, and is never turned off. First, the PATRIOT Act was passed by Congress shortly after 9/11, and has allowed the government to start watching people. Ever since then the U.S. has increased its use of cameras in public places. Today, just about everywhere businesses and shoppers are, there are cameras. High-tech surveillance devices are more prevalent across populated areas. Corporations, agencies and even individuals monitor social areas with surveillance. With today’s technology, cameras are able to scan images and identify people. Organizations regularly share databases, swapping personal information. Some are opposed

Though the consequences of citizen’s actions through technology today are not as severe or are non punishable, they do not take the government’s surveillance as seriously as the citizens of Oceania did in 1984. One NSA system can reach about 75% of all US Internet traffic, communications by foreigners and Americans (Gorman n. pag.). The US government's defense to surveillance claims is that the justification is National Security (Calamur n. pag.)., and this may be true, but the question of the freedom to privacy ratio, as a free nation, is still undecided. One way surveillance is now even more accessible is due to Google Glass. "With Google Glass, nobody's pointing a camera... phone. You no longer know if you're being filmed... an unspoken social rule is being violated" (Brown 42). and gives the government the ability to see from the point of view of anyone. With most every person you meet having quick access to some sort of recordable technology, it is easy to have your actions recorded or documented without your knowledge. The information can be easily spread around the world without your knowing or permission with just a simple touch. As said before, “.....an unspoken social rule is being violated” (Brown 42), taking away the sense of privacy and security felt by many Americans. Another form of surveillance, used by specifically the NYPD, is the use of undercover cops. Since The Occupy Wall Street

The general public gives an problem with the government surveillance as a media for invading others privacy. With the government monitoring, collecting, and retaining people's personal data, one side would claim that it is an infringement of their freedom to the rights to privacy. While the National security associations justifies the reason for monitoring would be to maintain order. Their ways to maintain order would be to monitor criminal and terrorist activity and to detect incoming threats, terrorists, or problems that would harm their country. This issue shows that freedom cannot exist without order. Although the general public wants their freedom of their privacy, they can not achieve their most of their desires because it puts their lives at risk without protection. Order is necessary in order to have freedom. It is impossible to attain entire freedom for a cause, however, it is possible to attain freedom to a certain

If an individual has a hard time getting up and adjusting things such as how bright the lights are, the individual can say, “Hey Alexa, dim the lights please”.[2] Then the Amazon Echo will proceed to dim the lights. The Echo Dot could also control the temperature of the room as well and adjust it with a command [6]. Also, if an individual decides to watch TV but does not want to get the phone and order pizza, he or she can say, “Hey Alexa, order a large cheese from domino's.” A negative effect Amazon Echo has on society is how it's always listening. Currently the Amazon Echo is being used in a murder case in Arkansas, which raises the question about how private an individual's conversations are. However, the police had to obtain a search warrant in order to access the Amazon Echo. This answers the question that an individual's conversations are being recorded by the Amazon Echo because it’s always on and listening. This can deteriorate people from buying the Amazon Echo, and other personal home assistants as well. As a result of this possible outcome, the economy could take a hit as well since everything has started to go with using voice commands such as the Xfinity X1. People would not invest their money into these companies and sell off their stocks because since the Amazon Echo stores the conversations on the cloud, a hacker could gain access to it and it could be used against them in a court of

Almost everything someone does in today’s society is under surveillance. It does not matter if you are surfing the web, going to the store, or even driving a car; it is almost always under surveillance. While Michel Foucault does not specifically talk about modern surveillance technology in Discipline & Punish (1977), much of the primitive technology that he does talk about is directly related with today’s surveillance technology. Michel Foucault believes that societal surveillance began to take effect during the 1600’s to control the masses. Many modern surveillance technologies reflect Foucault’s ideas helping to categorize, differentiate, hierarchize, and exclude people from the masses.

Surveillance is not a new thing. In fact, espionage, tracking, and sleuthing were part of society ever since 5000 B.C. But in the rise of the modern era, the idea of surveillance in the public eye serves as a controversial topic of discussion. People everywhere complain about the existence of security cameras, government tracking, and the right to privacy. Such problems, however, are not due to the sudden discovery of surveillance, but the modern abuse of it. Seeing the disastrous effects of over surveillance from George Orwell’s 1984, the public rightfully fears societal deterioration through modern surveillance abuse portrayed in Matthew Hutson’s “Even Bugs Will Be Bugged” and the effects of such in Jennifer Golbeck’s “All Eyes On You”. The abuse of surveillance induces the fear of discovery through the invasion of privacy, and ensures the omnipresence of one’s past that haunt future endeavors, to ultimately obstruct human development and the progress of society overall.

The central idea of this artical is that people are concered that what they say to alexa is not very private and people can see what you say. First, a man was killed and they had to use alexa to find who was the killer. The artical says that, "In the Arkansas case, authorities are investigating the death of a man found in a hot tub at a friend's home. They requested the home's Echo and Amazon's stored recordings in hopes they might contain evidence. The friend is charged with murder." Next, all the question you have goes to sombody that it working for amazon. The auothor wrote, "Once it hears someone say a keyword, such as "Alexa," it shares what it hears with Amazon's servers to process a response."

Government surveillance in the past was not a big threat due to the limitations on technology; however, in the current day, it has become an immense power for the government. Taylor, author of a book on Electronic Surveillance supports, "A generation ago, when records were tucked away on paper in manila folders, there was some assurance that such information wouldn 't be spread everywhere. Now, however, our life stories are available at the push of a button" (Taylor 111). With more and more Americans logging into social media cites and using text-messaging devices, the more providers of metadata the government has. In her journal “The Virtuous Spy: Privacy as an Ethical Limit”, Anita L. Allen, an expert on privacy law, writes, “Contemporary technologies of data collection make secret, privacy invading surveillance easy and nearly irresistible. For every technology of confidential personal communication…there are one or more counter-technologies of eavesdropping” (Allen 1). Being in the middle of the Digital Age, we have to be much more careful of the kinds of information we put in our digital devices.

Fear is inevitably tied to the common saying “I am watching you”. When one’s actions are constantly monitored and privacy being relentlessly invaded, the individual soon will possess a sort of fear. In the novel Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, the government uses surveillance as a tool for exploiting the privacy of the people which then engages their fear.

As we invest our lives into the allurements of the Internet, our privacy has stowed itself into the relative anonymity of vast city populations. But these precious moments of privacy, hidden in the over abundance of lives and routines, will soon be threatened by facial recognition technology (Frey 2016). Any negative connotations surrounding surveillance is reciprocated by the Orwellian dystopia which is popular for its pessimistic perspective. Although these visions of a restrictive surveillance state are just fictional ambiguous representations, their concerns should not be easily dismissed (Richards 2013). Subconsciously, derived from Orwell’s ideas, we recognize privacy’s role in the effort to avoid dehumanizing a country, however, according to Neil Richards (2013, 1934), “we lack an understanding of what ‘privacy’ means in this context and why it matters”. It is most critical that we address these questions now as facial recognition technology becomes increasingly prominent in our everyday lives.

Thesis statement: Government surveillance should be stopped because it is an invasion of privacy and gives the government control that is not enumerated in the constitution.

Originally an architectural model for a prison (Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon), American philosopher Michel Foucault applies the panopticon’s characteristics – which include: the lack of privacy; the forced conformity and changes in behaviour to cope with the lack of privacy; and lack of knowledge of who is watching you, why they are watching you, how, or whether you are being watched or not– to our modern world (Simon 2-3). Bart Simon argues, “To know one is being seen without being able to see carries with it uncertainty that becomes a source of anxiety, discomfort and terror” (Simon 4). In other words, feeling that you are being watched causes stress, which ultimately leads to “normalization” and “conformity” – changing our behaviour (which mimics the behaviour of those around us) to adapt (Simon 4-5, 7; Langlois). Furthermore, in the panoptic prison of our everyday world, we are inmates who try to adapt to the slow deterioration of our right to privacy. Citizenfour, presents the concepts of privacy and surveillance following the September 11 Terrorist Attacks, along with the behavioural effects of knowing one is relentlessly being watched by the state. Through the behaviour of Edward Snowden and the director’s use of symbolism, Citizenfour reveals the panoptic prison present in our modern

Jacob Silverman in his book “Terms of Service” has made numerous claims related to social media, the organizations that operate them, the latest news that one sees today. In the introduction chapter of his book he makes a claim that "communication has become synonymous with surveillance"(Silverman, vii). He tries to convince the audience by providing the list of some of the devices that are commonly seen around like camera, eyeglasses, phones, shoes etc. There have sensors which provide the feedback to social media company and they save that data. The users of these devices are mutually engaging in these types of surveillance. He claims that in this day and culture there are three type of surveillance going on, surveillance by governments,

One of the most salient trends in the technology space is the rapid adoption of voice-based interfaces like Amazon’s Echo. As AI and machine learning advancements make voice-based interaction more common and powerful, however, security and privacy concerns are beginning to bubble up. The recent news about an incident in San Diego, California, in which a broadcast news segment about a girl who ordered a dollhouse via her parents’ Amazon Echo repeated the voice command the girl used to order the toy, thereby prompting Echo devices within hearing distance of the television set in the greater San Diego area to likewise order dollhouses for their owners. That head slapping incident may be easy to fix. (Voice-based purchasing is “on” by default on Echo devices – perhaps a setting that should be changed.) But more subtle voice-based theft and hacking is on the way. Researchers have already shown that it’s possible to hide voice commands in ways that humans