How Did New Surveillance Technologies Affect Our Rights And Privacy

New surveillance technologies have changed the way we live and how the things done in the world. We live in the world where our activities and actions are collected, researched, recorded, distributed and analyzed. Even though the surveillance technologies have significantly improved and provided lots of positive impact on the society but there are also lots of question on how the surveillance technologies affect our rights and privacy. Before the invention of the new media genres such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype and communication technologies such as computers, cameras and telephones, people still have the privacy as their information and conversations are not being invaded and intercepted as it is impossible to do so. However, the advancement

Even though there are lot of positive effects of surveillance technology, there are also lots of debates about surveillance and privacy and there is still no solution for this issue. According to the study by Rosenbaum (1973), her study suggests that “the issue of invasion of privacy is a complex one that may not lend itself to broad and sweeping legal restrictions”. Citizen’s information is recorded and stored by certain organizations and companies, some of them especially the private sector misused its power by invading on citizen’s privacy. One of the example is the Terrorist Surveillance Program and PRISM implemented by National Security Agency which has been introduced after September 11 incident. PRISM is the program that is functioning to collect data of the citizens even though they do not have any connections with the terrorist acts or any faults. Through this program, NSA has the advantages to access the systems and collect data from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies (Georgieva, 2015). He also adds that NSA can collect any type of data including search history, email contents, transfer of files and live chats (2015). Because of this action, many people argue that the government are using “backdoor” to access private user data (Greenwald and MacAskill, 2013). It is clear that this program

Not just it helps citizen to feel secure but it can increase the national level of security. New media and communication technology also help human to interact with one another from all over the world. However, the powerful people are in charge of the surveillance system should know the limit while monitoring and searching for someone from databases or surveillance cameras. They should not invade the privacy and limit the freedom of the people that are being watched while the people who are being watched should not fear that they are being watched and must know how their data is being used and the law that personal information is not to give out without