By Hien Bui, Staff Writer
Last week, a 14-year-old boy uncovered a glitch in Apple’s Group FaceTime software that left users vulnerable to audio eavesdropping. The group FaceTime feature was taken offline in an effort to prevent further privacy breaches, but some say Apple was too late with their reaction. The bug sparked debate among users and lawmakers.
This has been the first scandal concerning the group FaceTime feature since it was introduced to phones in fall of 2018. However, the bug is just the latest demonstration that technology, as useful as it is, can deviate from its intended purposes and be used as a means of surveillance. As the Internet becomes further entangled with the fabrics of our lives, we must ask ourselves where it begins to be too much and whether what might be the greatest tool at our disposal might also pose the biggest threat.
The FaceTime bug’s predecessors range from hacked baby monitors to Edward Snowden leaking highly classified files from the National Security Agency (NSA), which revealed that, alongside spying on foreign countries, the NSA was also peering into the lives of American citizens using methods that undermined Internet security and the privacy people believed they were afforded.
Since then, the public have also seen security breaches within major companies that placed the sensitive information and data of millions of Americans right into the hands of hackers and, more recently, the rise of data-mining.
Data-mining is an analytic method that utilizes patterns and raw data to create information about a certain demographic of users. Social media giants like Facebook and Instagram use it in their algorithms to generate ads that fit your interests and predict future trends. While this type of data is used to create a better user experience, some have raised questions about what they see as unregulated surveillance efforts.
However, the Internet is here, and here to stay. Being as vast and far-reaching as it has become, it’s impossible to police every site that pops up on the World Wide Web. Likewise, if all current regulations were taken off of what people can find and view, it’d be a disaster of unimaginable proportions.
Everyday, the Internet adapts and changes and updates. As we progress along this path of digitalization, we must emphasize information privacy and our own rights if we want to stay safe. We must also hold companies or the government accountable for when they overstep their boundaries or misuse our information. Whether the Internet is our greatest tool or greatest detriment is up to us to decide.
