Edward Snowden claimed that there is no state of privacy in the United States. He explained that people’s phones can be tracked by cell phone towers, the wireless network the phone is connected to, and other wireless networks that the phone is not connected to. Snowden said, “wireless network identifiers are connected and mapped out against a GPS.” Phones are being tracked all the time. The U.S anonymizes the data taken from citizen’s devices and looks at it as a whole. There is currently no basic privacy law in the United States. Snowden said, “the architecture of oppression is being built.” U.S. citizens may not care about Microsoft or Apple having access to their data, but they may not realize how easy it is for other countries such as Russia or China to access their personal data. I have seen TikToks of teens going on a website called Omegle. It allows you to facetime random people and you just press “skip” to move onto the next person. The video I saw was of a teen girl and the person on the other side of the screen was a random man. In the span of two minutes, he was able to find out where she lived and what her name was. She freaked out and exited the app. Another example is of an app called Snapchat. It has a feature where you can turn your location on, and any person who is following you can see where you are at any point in time. My last example is of Google Maps. Every morning, google sends me a notification saying that it will take me twenty minutes to get to Xavier. Google maps noticed the pattern of me going to school every day around 8am, which is so scary to think about. I agree with all the claims made by Snowden.
