An inmate in a maximum security prison was recently involved in a privacy case that went all the way to Maryland’s highest court. Usually inmates, especially those who have committed heinous enough crimes to land themselves into a maximum security prison, are expected and granted no privacy. These people have forfeited that right by taking away someone else’s rights, sometimes even through murder. This man actually killed another prisoner while already serving his prison sentence.

What happened was he wrote a letter to his dad and left it in an unsealed envelope. The letter described his confusion with his actions, and how he was disturbed that he killed another man. Prison officials seized the letter and used it as evidence against the man in a case against him. This letter provided irrefutable proof that he did indeed kill the man, and this would certainly land him a guilty charge, with no contest. This man would be in prison for the rest of his life, if not land him on death row.

In court, prison officials argued that the letter wasn’t sealed, and that all prisoners have to have all of their mail scanned and censored, both out-going and incoming. This, they argue, would have had the letter found anyway, so they would have gotten him like that. They also argue the letter is good evidence. The man argues that his Fourth Amendment rights were being violated by them reading and seizing his un-sent letter. Even though it was unsealed, they still should have not been allowed to get into it. By doing this, the evidence should be negated he said, and he wasn’t planning on sending the letter anyway, it was just a venting system.

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Online advertising has been around since the dawn of the Internet, and is more or less prevalent on pretty much every site you visit. MySpace, FaceBook, and other social networking sites are especially populated with them, and they are propagated to every user who has to navigate to a different page. Ask any FaceBook user and they will tell you; there is an ad on every page. Some may protest and demand an explanation to why FaceBook is subjecting them to these incessant advertisements. The answer is simple though: the site is free, how do you think they make money? It is a brilliant idea; take a service people will flock to, and make it free, but charge advertisers top dollar to put ads on your site due to the high volumes of traffic. While FaceBook has to pay to keep their domain name and maintain servers that hold all friends, profiles, and other system information on them, they are not hurting for cash. Every time you click on an ad they make some money, and it adds up.

While these ads are seen, who can be sure they are clicked on? Everyone has had an instance where an ad pops up on their web browser that has absolutely no interest to them. Let’s take the stock example of a stereotypical avatar of masculinity: this man loves football and all day meticulously surfs and updates his fantasy football page, making trades and offers. Then he heads over to ESPN and watches some online football to see how the players and teams are doing to decide where to take his team, then an ad pops up. The ad consists of a new flower product that “will make your garden bloom like never before.” After considering for a moment what the ad is, and asserting that “flower” has nothing to do with “pig skin”, the man would quickly exit out the pest and be on with his negotiations.

Things have changed recently though. When this man would get ads of flower products, sweet smelling detergent, and other emasculated items, it was a completely random affair. Now this same man might be seeing ads showing off awesome football strategies, or trying to sell an in-depth guide on all of the major players. While this seems like a good thing, it isn’t. The information is pulled right from your surfing, and without your knowledge.

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With the advent of the social networking site, people spend more time online than ever before. Some people don’t even meet in person anymore, because it is more convenient to arrange a quick chat online. People load up their profiles with all sorts of personal information and pictures for the world to see. Privacy filters are virtually non-existent, and those that do exist are rendered useless by the public. Why only have “friends” view your profile when everyone who sends one message to you is instantly a “friend”? The truth is, these sites are terrible for people’s privacy, and people are just now waking up.

Germans and Germany in general are very cognizant about what goes up on the Internet, as they are often haunted by constant reminding of the Holocaust and the stigmas attached to it. Lately the German population has become suspect of the U.S. company FaceBook. They are convinced that FaceBook is completely disregarding their privacy rights and not securing all of their information.

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Internet piracy; although it has nothing to do with the swashbuckling scallywags that ride around on big ships and steal and plunder from innocents, the concepts are similar. Online piracy deals with a bunch of different things, be it music, games, movies, documents, or any other online media strata. These pirates, who are often just kids sitting in their rooms downloading music for free, are actually doing more than damage than they know for everyone.

The biggest detriment these pirates do to the world is the hurting of the economy. First of all, the music industry is hit the hardest. These kids and their stealing of the songs means no money for the bands, and without this money, the bands have no motivation or any means to make any new songs. There was a time was CD and record sales were through the roof, and since then, online sales have skyrocketed. Now though, neither is doing well because people are just sharing the music for free on peer to peer networks instead of legally going out and buying it.

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Information used to be stored in a manner that was easy to manage. They would have these giant computers that were large enough to hold terabytes of information (that is a lot!) that ranged from internal controls to customer’s profiles and user preferences. These servers  were encrypted and made secure by the companies that ran them. They were also password secured and this way only authorized employees could access the data if they needed to.  When they searched for easier network management, the answer was right in front of them: the Internet. With unlimited sconnectivity and always done at cheap prices, it represented a win-win for these companies.

By storing information on the Internet, it made their consumer’s data vulnerable.  The problem is, these monolithic computers were safe and secure, while the Internet wasn’t nearly as secure. The Internet can be easily hacked into, while these massive computers and their networks had so many privacy and safety safeguards that the N.S.A. would have had trouble trying to break in. The fact is though, the consumer’s lost this battle. While it helped out the big shot companies by removing their burden of network management, it hurt the consumers by having their security decreased by a large amount, and put their information at risk. “Cloud Computing” is the term put to this in discrepant practice of putting all information on the web rather than the large personal databases.

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No, not the sugary sweet ones. These cookies are much less succulent, and can sometimes be dangerous, and not just for your diet plan. These online cookies are just little pieces of data that a website puts on your computer when you log on. Inside the cookies are strands of information that record various things that you did on the Internet, like what parts of the site you went on, how long you stayed there, and other things about your browsing habits. This information is supposed to be helpful and for the most part it is. It serves to tell the website that it is you signing on, and though this they can bring you back to the parts of the site you liked, or even automatically load all of your user preferences that you had stored. This allowed for a more stream-lined browsing of the site, and also it allows for a site to be loaded faster.

As was mentioned before though, cookies can also be dangerous. Instead of the helpful cookies mentioned above, you can possibly have malicious cookies. These are cookies installed on your computer either by a hacker or a bad website. Through this, they can hack into your folders and steal your passwords, or simply try and track you back to your real-life location. Even worse, these cookies could contain viruses that are planted directly on to your hard drive, and your virus scanner might not even recognize it. These can either be installed to try and steal identifying data about you, or simply with malicious intent to crash your system.

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Everything today in the “Information Generation” focuses on expediting anything that can be, and automating anything that can be. Criminals these days can actually steal without being close to anyone or anything: a scary thought, but it is true. Many people have heard the story or watched the video of Chris Paget. He simply climbed in his car, and after arming himself with some easily purchasable Motorola tracking technology, he cruised around Fisherman’s Wharf, looking for victims. Soon enough, his device picked up some radio signals, and downloaded directly to his laptop the names and numbers of people’s identity cards that had been loaded with the new radio-interfacing. He was able to steal these people’s identity and information from over twenty feet away, and nobody was the wiser; beats pick pocketing for sure! His video made headlines all over the Internet, and although he didn’t use the information maliciously, and simply as a pedagogic tool, it opened people’s eyes: that could have been me!

The government asserts that these tracking technologies will speed up the entry of citizens back into the country, checks at borders, and deter interlopers from trying to get into the United States. What they propose to do is insert a tiny radio frequency chip into every citizen’s identification cards and driver’s licenses to speed up the process of identifying someone. Basically, they give the border example. Instead of pulling up to a border, rummaging around for your pass and having an official scan it, and ask you twenty questions, you do absolutely nothing. That’s right; you don’t even have to pull your card out. As long as it is in your car or up to a twenty feet radius, the person will simply press a button to remotely scan it, and you will be on your way.

This all sounds great, and it really is intuitive and breakthrough technology. It would be a bit hedonistic to believe that it is all good however; there are two sides to every coin. The downside of this technology is that is possibly makes you traceable. As Chris showed the world with his criminal documentary, these cards could be scanned by a non-government official for a bad purpose, and your identity would be stolen. You wouldn’t even realize it until much later either! If your passport is stolen now, you would know because you wouldn’t be able to find it. If this new technology is ratified and employed, the consequences could be dire. You could be holding your passport or I.D., but it could actually be already stolen. A strange concept to grasp, but altogether unsettling.

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Although the Internet has many uses these days, the most popular use of it has to be for online shopping. It seems that Ebay may have started the craze, but these online vendors have blown up since its advent. Amazon, Craigslist; they all are successful sites and are probably the most highly populated sites on the Internet today.

Although these places say they are all about the customer, one cannot sometimes always be fooled so. Many of these companies are coming out of the woodwork and coming into scandals regarding the privacy of their loyal consumer’s data.

When you sign up for these stores services and go to buy something, you are prompted to enter all sorts of data. At the time, it all seems to be for the good of expedited shipping, and other company related things. Even a credit card number is required, so that the seller may have access to his or her money.

Everybody is familiar with the stories of people getting swindled by false companies, or being tricked by an unreliable seller. This is not a big concern on the big selling sites, but there is another thing that is. They sell your private information to third party companies who then in turn try to sell you even more things.

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In the old days, before the dawning of the “Information Age”, when criminals would commit a crime, they would be fugitives on the run for a long time; laying low. They would re-emerge after hiding out for a number of years and slowly re-make their empire. The times have changed, and so have the criminals. Criminals now brazenly go directly to court to change their names and escape police records.

When police bring someone in, obviously they remember a face, but after it has been a long time they simply look someone’s name up to see who’s who. A violent gang member who was arrested by police recently changed his name to Tony Soprano, after the popular Sopranos television show character. The police did not know him as Tony Soprano though. After his name change, if the police were to pull him over and run his license, they would have no record of “Tony Soprano” a being violent criminal. When they run someone’s license, if the person comes back as a past felon, they will approach with caution. Tony Soprano had no record though, and they probably just laughed about the irony of his name being the same as a murderous television show character’s. Little do they know he likely is armed.

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Illegal immigration is a big problem in the U.S. today and is growing worse by the day. American citizens are losing jobs everyday to their illegal counterparts who will work for much less than they will. While minimum wage is what the lowest income Americans live with, for people of less developed countries, this money is unlike anything they have ever seen  before. Think about it from an employer’s perspective; you have two workers, and one will work for less money; who do you pick? The answer is obvious, as money is everyone’s number one concern.

The public has remained quiet about this problem for some time, but the downturn in the economy has made getting a job and holding one much more difficult. The U.S. is discussing the implementation of biometric cards to verify that all employees are legitimate citizens. They propose to use iris scans or maybe fingerprint scans that would require every employee to sign in at the beginning of every day and especially for job interviews.

The plan also proposes to step up immigration security and make it more difficult for someone to infiltrate the U.S.’s borders. For workers who are illegal but have been in the U.S. for some time, they will offer naturalization processes that are normally only available to legitimate immigrants.

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