Surveillance or Law Enforcement

In the modern day, surveillance is everywhere. You are being recorded at all times. Whether it is an actual surveillance camera or public onlookers, you are being watched and recorded by many people and places. Here at Southern Arkansas University, there are surveillance cameras everywhere. At Penny Arcade Expos, you are being recorded by media, attendees, companies, and so much more. You can't really get away from surveillance.

Interesting things have happened from such surveillance footage. Websites have sprung up from such. You can also find Youtube videos and more from surveillance and other customers at your favorite stores and restaurants. One such website is People of Walmart. 

People of Walmart shows off what should be embarrassing photos of people at Walmart. You can find everything from weird clothing, to vehicles, to pets, to whatever you can think of. The sad part of this is that although most of these pictures should be embarrassing, it seems the people in them were not embarrassed when they were in them.



Moving on to a different topic of surveillance, we need to watch our devices. Back in 2013, there were many issues with the NSA spying on civilians. A whole scandal came out of it after Edward Snowden leaked government secrets. This led to big issues between the customers and the companies who complied with the NSA. This also led to issues with certain products out on the market at the time. One such product that had issues due to this scandal was the Xbox One.

The Xbox One came packaged with the Kinect 2.0. The Kinect 2.0 had a large number of camera and sensors such as a depth sensor, IR sensor, tracking sensing, and could even read your heart rate. As you may understand not very many people liked the idea of this as the NSA scandal had just happened. What made it worse was that Xbox originally announced it as a necessary accessory which had to be plugged in and online at all times. People were worried about Microsoft gathering your information and recording everything you do through your Xbox. They did not want that to happen or for the government to get ahold of information on what you do.

Here in the US we have a right to privacy, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." So it makes sense that people would worry about such issues. The government should not be able to infringe upon your rights. 

I do recommend you do your best to make sure your home devices are not watching you. Covering webcams and turning off smart devices can help with this. Also, however, do not be too worried about this or feel like everything is watching you. You should not be paranoid about it all. Just be careful and intelligent, and remember you are always being watched.