Road to Freedom
First things first, we should be thankful that we all live in a country where there is freedom to speak on our views. As decades passed and technology evolved the ways of expressing our views have changed completely. We spend most of the time on various social networking sites, updating status almost regularly, sharing our locations, our likes and dislike, our religion and even our views on politics. Now the question is what if we are being tracked? What if these data are easily available to the trackers. You are then left with two replies :
- Either you completely deny the fact that it is possible.
- Or you say you got nothing to hide and got no problem with it!
You will find most of the people who state that they have nothing secret in them to hide, it sounds like you don't care about your fundamental rights as you have got nothing special to speak.
To say that you have nothing to hide means like you have nothing to say to protect your freedom of speech.
-Edward Snowden
If you think your privacy is safe and no one is peeping inside your personal and professional life, you need to go through inspiring true story of Edward Snowden and how he was chased when he chose the path of adversaries to benefit others instead of spending rest of his life luxuriously.
Edward Snowden
Edward Joseph Snowden was working as a contractor under US Government where he had access to all the classified files collected from the global surveillance. Edward revealed in public misuse of around billions of internet data and telephonic data records which is called metadata collected by government globally without user's interest. Edward saw that this was a direct attack on the citizens' Freedom of Speech and privacy.
Government's Point of View
Right after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, US government took various steps to curb terrorism among which one was to give secret access to US State Secret Service which can conduct the surveillance on any of citizen's phone record, GPS location, browser history, etc. Through MNC's like Google, Facebook, Apple they started to gain the data on the citizens. According to the report, there have been about 1.2 million people under the US watch list. Government believes that they can prevent terror attack before it happens using mass surveillance at the stake of our Right to privacy.
Conclusion
Most of the time we fall prey to the online trackers like Facebook and Google where our privacy is more vulnerable. We should try to avoiding websites that tracks our identity and location. Always open-source software should be preferred over a proprietary one.