Hello everyone! Welcome back, I hope you have all had a fantastic week! 
If you take into account that according to worldometers.info there are 332,596,817 people in the United States as of April 24th, 2021, you'll quickly realize that approximately 89% of the United States population has access to a smartphone.
In the Leadership and Media Strategies class, we recently studied an article published by CNBC about how Apple is choosing to update its privacy settings for consumer safety.
I don't know about you, but recently I have been feeling a little weighed down by a rectangular device about the size of the palm of my hand that goes everywhere I do... What is that device you may ask? Well, it helps guide me from Point A to Point B, it allows me to take pictures from anywhere, and it keeps me connected with people I may never see otherwise... That's right, you guessed it—This week I am talking about my smartphone!
How many of you have a smartphone? According to statista.com, around 298 million people in the United States have a smartphone in the year 2021. Here is the chart from their website:
While I subconsciously realized that almost everyone I know has access to some type of smartphone, reading these statistics startled me. With the first smartphone being introduced in 1994, it is obvious that smartphones have evolved and made major headway into the homes of most American's within the past 27 years (Tocci, 2020).
Keeping this in mind, we must also realize that with this new access to technology on a daily basis comes a new responsibility of smartphone privacy and etiquette. We also have a newly found sense of pressure to stay connected at all times. Plus, since no one has ever experienced anything like this before, we are all learning together and pushing the boundaries of what's to come on a daily basis.
People like Mark Zuckerberg, Creator of Facebook, are thinking of new ways to keep all of us connected while being miles apart.
People like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Creators of Google, are thinking of new ways to provide us with the answers to all of life's questions.
People like Adam Cheyer, Creator of Siri, are thinking of new ways to allow the technology we are using to feel more personable.
While all of this is great, it also comes with some hesitations and reluctance from many people who long for much simpler times. I personally can only imagine what it was like to grow up in a time where the main source of news was a paper thrown into your driveaway every morning around 5am, a time when parents would send their children to the store without supervision on a bicycle, a time that allowed people to really get to know their neighbors better than they knew their social media personalities.
So back to my original statement—Recently, I have been feeling a little weighed down by my smartphone...
Lately, it seems that every time I start to take a mental health break, I get overwhelmed by the notifications steadily pouring into my phone. Messages from friends, text messages from family, and emails from coworkers are constantly coming into the small computer in my hand. That's not even mentioning the countless push notifications I receive from McDonald's and Starbucks every week.
Maybe you're thinking, "Cayden, all you have to do is turn off your notifications." Well, you are right; however, receiving all of this constant communication from others had me start thinking about how convenient it is to contact each other. It makes me long to experience a time where we could choose not to respond without having to put ourselves in "Do Not Disturb" mode.
I feel a constant pressure to be connected with everyone on social media. While no one is forcing me to post and engage with other people's content, I feel as a communicator that I must be actively sharing parts of myself with people on the internet—whom of which I may or may not know. For example, even now as I type this blog post I realize that I am sharing my personal thoughts with you all despite the fact that I may never meet some of you who are reading this. I am hyperactively aware that anyone, at any time, could search for me online and find out who I am, what I like, who my friends are, and probably some brief life history. My life may be my own, but as soon as I post anything on the web—my privacy is not.
"Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age." —Andy Grove
While learning more and more about online marketing and advertisements, I realize just how much of my personal cell phone data is shared with multiple companies every time I log into my device. Just the other day I discovered that you can open your Google Maps App and see a timeline of everywhere you have been since you downloaded the application and gave it permission to access your location.
I'm not going to lie to you, the amount of information about each of us that lives in the internet databases is terrifying. The service providers and creators of our devices can access what we search, what we view, and how long we view it. This information is oftentimes sold to marketing and ad agencies to help them create algorithms that target each of us individually based on our location, demographics, and preferences.
You can read the article here.
In this article, it discusses Apple's addition of new software called App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, that will force app makers outside of the Apple App Store to ask for permission before they can track the unique identifier on each iOS device that has been serving as a means of tracking for ad agencies across the US.
Any time you see an ad pop up in an app, whether it is on Facebook, Instagram, or Candy Crush, it has been strategically placed because of your preferences and search history. For years, many of these common applications have been tracking this data without any accountability. We know that companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat sell digital ads to businesses, but have you ever wondered why your ads seem to always match what you are thinking about?
These companies use your analytic data to target each of us through geo-fence filters that allow them to show specific people groups certain ads to boost sales. While this is great for businesses, what does it mean for our privacy? Is Andy Grove right? In my opinion, he is. Privacy IS one of the biggest problems in our totally plugged-in society.
They may not be harming us, but are they helping us? Is Apple's new update about my security, or is it about their gain? Is it safe for me to have my information sitting in thousands of databases all over the world? Could my personal notes, contacts, bank information, and conversations be shared at any time? These are just a few of the questions I have found myself asking recently...
While I feel like I don't have anything to hide, my question is this—at what point do we have the right to say enough is enough and take back some of our privacy? Is this the new normal, or is now the time to step up and take back what I believe is a basic human right? Comment below and let me know what you think about our personal privacy in the digital age.
References:
Tocci, M. (2020, December 16). History of smartphones - what was the first smartphone?: Simpletexting.
Retrieved April 25, 2021, from https://simpletexting.com/where-have-we-come-since-the-first- smartphone/#:~:text=The%20first%20smartphone%2C%20created%20by,to%20every%20smartphone
%20that%20followed.
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