How Technology Invades the Privacy of Consumers

In this paper you will find the different ways that technology invades the privacy of consumers. Also, this paper will describe the advantages and disadvantages the way the public will be able to access the information of private citizens. It will also the measure or how far a person can go to research the data on an individual. This paper will also the describe the federal laws and alo determine the electronic privacy laws.

1. List and describe at least three (3) technologies that allow an individual to research citizens’ private data.

A technology that allows an individual to research private data is the Global Positioning System (GPS). This “is a navigation and precise-positioning tool” developed in the early seventy’s by the Department of Defense. Although GPS was originally designed for the military, its applications have extended into the public sector to provide researchers the specific location of an individual (Glasscoe, 1998).

A malicious technology that can be used to research an individual’s private data is spyware. In general, it is software that can be loaded on an internet ready device, such as a computer or smartphone, with the sole purpose of gathering and transmitting one’s private data to another person. Spyware is “designed to be difficult to remove,” and the collection and transmission of information can be completed without the individual’s consent (Microsoft, 2012).

In contrast to spyware, social networking services are freely provided with and individual’s private data. Social networking services are web based platform

2 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