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Technology Threatens Your Privacy Essay example

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Privacy threats are currently the biggest threat to National Security today. The threats are not only concerning to the government, however. An alarming 92% of Americans are concerned that the power grid may be vulnerable to a cyber-attack (Denholm). Although this is a more recent development to the cyber threats we have experienced, this is not the first time that privacy threats have stepped into the limelight as people are forced to watch their every online move.
There are twelve major ways technology threatens your online policy today. The first of these threats is phishing. According to Riva Richmond, phishing is a ploy to gain personal information that will help people to steal your identity. Hackers will send you fake e-mails that …show more content…

This makes you vulnerable as you just shared very personal information with everyone on the internet (Richmond).
The history of your web use may not be a big deal to you but it reveals a ton of information. It reveals everything you have ever searched which means people can find out things like where you bank, work, and go to school. Targeted advertising and cookies also are a threat to privacy because companies collect a lot of information about us in order to figure out what we are likely to buy, and to place their advertisements on our webpages. They get this sensitive information through cookies which they place on our computers, which allow them to access our personal information. Cloud computing is also a huge threat because these sites, which often include e-mail services, instant messaging, and document services, do not have security features which protect our privacy and the confidential things that we don’t want other people to view (Richmond).
Electronic medical data has also become a source of concern when it comes to our privacy. Although the federal government requires that medical data be kept private, it doesn’t cover programs like Google Health or Microsoft’s HealthVault in those protection laws which raises the risk of your medical information being breached. Public Wi-Fi isn’t exactly keeping our private information safe either. They often don’t encrypt data which makes it easier for hackers to gain access

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