Post 5

 While many people find it easy to write off electronic invasions of privacy, that may be the case because they don't know the extent to which the governments and corporations of the world are truly surveilling their citizens. These issues affect all of us because they are targeted toward the entire population. Different countries have been taking their levels of surveillance to different extremes, with one example of extreme privacy invasions being China, which makes a habit of utilizing facial recognition to monitor the behavior of its own citizens. While the united states has not implemented that technology to such an extreme, if there is a precedent set that government surveillance over its own citizens is acceptable then it may open the door to similar policies.

    Ideally, the government should be limiting the ability for local police departments to collect electronic data on their own residents with surveillance technologies. For example, the automatic license plate readers that police cars are equipped with currently logs all the photos they take in a database for storage. This means that every citizen, whether they have done wrong or not, is actively having their location monitored every time they pass an automatic license plate reader. It may not be entirely possible to protect ourselves from this level of privacy invasion, but there are ways to limit our online footprints. By making accounts with fake names and burner email addresses, using VPNs and avoiding posting photos of ourselves we make it more difficult for our privacy to be taken advantage of.