Tech Trends That Put Your Privacy in Danger
There’s no argument that technology is the driving force of humanity. Tech innovations help bring comfort and convenience in our everyday lives, but there’s also a price we pay for using it. At ZoogVPN, we strive to keep our readers informed on all privacy and security-related issues. This time around, we decided to take a closer look at how certain real-life technologies put your privacy in danger. Read this week’s Zlog and find out about the most dangerous tech trends of today.
Most Dangerous Technologies
Privacy-conscious online users know that useful tools like VPNs, encryption, and anonymous browsers like Tor can help them maintain online privacy and anonymity. In line with these tools, there are also tech inventions that infringe on your online privacy and can pose a threat to your identity. To help you protect against these tech trends, we’re bringing you the three most dangerous technologies in 2020.
Facial Recognition
If you’ve been to cities like London, San Francisco, Singapore, not to mention any metropolis in China, you’ve most likely noticed that there’s an increasing presence of surveillance cameras on almost every corner. In these cities, and many more, your public activities are monitored continuously, and there’s no telling who can be watching on the other side beside the government.
If these reasons weren’t enough, there are additional causes for concern. The facial recognition system as it is now is not that effective, and there have been a lot of reported cases of false positives, in which facial recognition system wrongly identified innocent people. When law enforcement officers use such technology, it could have severe consequences for the concerned person. Due to these reasons, it comes to no surprise that pro-democracy protesters have been rising all over the world.
While there is a significant pushback on facial recognition, if the technology gets advanced enough at some point in the future, it’s going to be very hard to protect against it in everyday public life.
Electronic Money
Carrying large amounts of money in your pocket is not only inconvenient, but it puts you in danger of getting robbed or losing it. That’s why more and more people are deciding to use credit and debit cards. But, even though this payment method is an efficient way of making transactions, it can also infringe on your privacy and expose your identity to various third parties.
When you pay with a card, your transactions are analyzed and open for the government to see. This way, you’re effectively leaving a trail of personal information everywhere you go, making it easy for the government to snoop on you. What’s worse, in some cases, financial institutions sell your information to advertisers, which opens up a whole different world of possible identity theft problems.
Commuting and Ride-Sharing Apps
Ride-sharing apps are yet another useful invention that helps us save time, money, and also benefit the environment. While all of this is very convenient to use these apps, you have to give up on a lot of personal information, that way putting your privacy in danger. Not only this, the app will log and predict where you go in your everyday life, making that information available to again, both the government and advertisers. When using it to commute, the app will know where you’re going before you even get there, which is something you should give out easily in return for the convenience. If you can afford to buy and maintain a car, or if your city has relatively decent public transportation, avoid using ride-sharing apps for your commuting needs.
Stay on top of technology
These three examples above are just the most popular ones, although there are many other ways that technology intrudes on our privacy. That’s why it’s crucial to be vigilant and reject using any technology that violates your privacy. With that in mind, also pay attention to the latest online trends and make sure to keep your online activities under a tight lock. If you wish to hide your valuable personal information when using the Internet, consider using a VPN. Sign up with ZoogVPN or try our service for free and ensure that you’re always anonymous and protected from your government and various third parties snooping on you.
Yaroslav S.CEO at ZoogVPN. Yaroslav is a versatile manager with extensive customer support experience. His historical background and a deep passion for philosophy perfectly complete a real desire to create meaningful content and tech products.
