Are We Safe?: A Discussion on Cyber Security

Everyone was excited when Apple launched its new iPhone and when Facebook brought out Graph Search. Would you still love it if you knew your private information was at risk? Just about everyone around the world has a Facebook or Twitter account or a smart phone that enables any form of social media.

There is a rumor going around that Apple has agreed to share information gathered from the fingerprint scanning system with the NSA; however, there is no definite answer as to whether this is true. My question is: how would you feel if it were true? Though the FBI already has fingerprint information for all citizens, the Apple fingerprint scanning can be directly linked to anything and everything that you do on your phone.

With each advancement in the technological world, we are making it easier for anyone to access information about our private lives. This brings us back to the question of whether we are safe having our information online. Recently, it was found that even Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile is not safe. A security researcher hacked into Zuckerberg’s account to show Facebook’s lack of privacy and failed security.

This topic links directly to a course that I am taking at Florida Tech for my computer science degree called Legal, Ethical and Social Issues in Computing. We are currently going over issues of cyber bullying, which can be defined as the psychological harm induced over the Internet. Matters like this are very important in today’s world because we see examples of this constantly. This got me thinking–ethically, where do we draw the line? How can we make our private information more secure?