Privacy

If your mother uses wifi at home to send you e-mail, and your home network is not protected by WEP or WPA, what reasons would you suggest to her for enabling one of these two protocols at home if the liability of reading those e-mails still exists once her message leaves your home, on it’s way to school?

If my mother were to use wifi to send me an e-mail and my home network was not protected I would defiantly be suggesting for her to enable WEP or WPA!!! I think that it is very important, especially in today’s cyber world to keep what you can keep, private. Either of these protocols offers confidentiality, something that my mother would not have had before. It is also nice to have a little bit more confidence in that what you sending are protected and a more secure network. I do believe that nothing is ever really private anymore and I know that enabling one of these protocols doesn’t guarantee complete privacy but it is a start and will make the overall experience more reliable. I do feel that one is more advanced than the other and would be a better quality service to use and that would be WPA. This system, from my reading in class and a little bit of outside reading I found that WPA was developed in regards to the weakness of WEP, which just reiterates what I already stated; that privacy isn’t really that private and there are always flaws in a system that make it almost impossible to secure each and every little thing. But overall I would suggest a protocol to my mom so she can have a more secure and protected network than she had before.


Some news reports have suggested that the Bush administration used the USA Patriot Act to look at the e-mails of American citizens without a warrant. What’s your position if this was indeed the case? Should citizens be willing to give up their privacy? Does it bother you to know that your online communications are very potentially semi-private instead of private?

I don’t really think that looking at e-mails without a warrant by any means is right. People have a right to privacy which has really almost all been taken away by Bush. Almost everything is digital now and a large majority of people use e-mail as a way of communicating. To be allowed to have access to someone’s privacy without a warrant is really taking away the rights of citizens. I don’t think that most citizens would give up their privacy, but I don’t think that we have a choice in the matter. Most of the time it is being done and none of us even know it is going on which is the scary part. What you do, when you think something it is private, it’s most likely not. It is like a constantly being watched feeling; to know that what you do at any point can be seen by someone else with whom you did not give permission or access to see. Overall, I think this is something that is here to stay and is only going to intensify as technology increases over time.