Toward an ethic of personal technologies

Author: Rhema Zlaten

Date: April 7, 2017

Link: https://www.digitalethics.org/essays/toward-ethic-personal-technologies

First Impressions: Looking at the title alone, I can not give any first impressions since it is kind of vague and I can not get the context of the whole essay from the title. So I read the first paragraph and base my first impression from that, first impression is that the essay talks about how people, especially Americans are not aware of their data being monitored by their own government and they have to care even more about the privacy of their information since they lack knowledge concerning how digital information is collected and used in governments and businesses.

Quote: “The human-computer relationship will only deepen as new life-enhancing technologies emerge and gain traction in our culture.”

Reflection: 

As time goes by and technology/applications improves, so does the benefits it provides to its users and the more benefits technology provides to its users, the more active the customer will be when using the technology. All looks good on the outside, but when one gains knowledge of what happens on the inside, everything changes. When reading the article, what surprised me the most was the use of dirt box technologies, dirt box technologies are used for data collection and gathering by airplanes roaming around in America. This made me interested about it so I looked it up even more to see if I am a possible victim of this, and from my research I found out that I am a victim of this, since it is not only constrained to airplanes but also applies to cell towers, and made me a lot more frightened of browsing through the web and messaging my friends because each message and usage of my internet is being monitored and my data is being collected. Also, as Edward Snowden mentioned in the recent Joe Rogan podcast, that when you turn your phone off, we do not know if it is ‘really’ turned off, and he also mentioned how the phone talks to a cell tower even though it is fully turned off through IMEI number and SIM card. I have no idea of what to do at this point since there is no ‘kill switch’ found on any phone that will let me kill any active application that is turned on in the background while it is not being used, it would be a good idea for smartphone companies to implement this idea so that they would give users full control of their device.

5 Things I Learned:

1. There is a high percentage of Americans that are not concerned about the right to information privacy.

2. The military and the government use aircrafts, also known as dirt box technologies, for data collection of thousands of people at once without their consent.

3. The captured data from dirt box technologies are used to track criminal activity.

4. Americans who are part of the data gathered from dirt box are not aware of their data being gathered.

5. Human-computer symbiosis might involve chips being planted into our bodies or a fully integrated human-robot interface.

5 Integrative Questions:

1. Are Americans who are part of the dirt box data collection aware of their data being collected by the government?

2. If Americans are aware of their data being collected, what made them give the government the consent to collect their data?

3. Will the future of humans be transmediation, where in the human’s online and offline self blend into one identity?

4. Will people choose benefits of technology over the privacy of their information?

5. Is there a cap or a limit on businesses when it comes to collecting big data for their own individual purposes?