User:Cole bodine/Draft

The following is a draft for my topic (Obviously this note doesn't count towards the word count, but just want to make a note of what this is).

GPS and Geolocation
An ethical issue regarding technology that affects many Americans today is the use of GPS in smartphones. While people generally believe that smartphone GPS is beneficial for a wide variety of reasons, a topic of conversation often brought up is that smartphone GPS can be an invasion of privacy.

Smartphone GPS and Geolocation can be used for a variety of reasons. A common use of GPS technologies in smartphones is driving apps, Waze and Google Maps. However, GPS can be used for more than simple day-to-day activities. According to GPS.gov, GPS is often used in search and rescue missions, military endeavors, and weather forecasting. On another hand, in an article by the New York Post, cell phone companies have been found selling user location data to third-party companies, which causes alarm to those who do not wish to have their privacy breached. This would be of little concern if one could simply turn their GPS off. However, some companies, such as Google, have admitted to tracking user location data even with GPS turned off. In 2018, Vice's Motherboard magazine reported an article that talked in detail about malware companies hacking into phones and accessing phone GPS without permission of the user. If a person with malicious intentions were to be able to do this, it could put the lives of a targeted person in danger.

Data
In a digital world, much of our personal lives are stored on devices such as computers and smartphones, and we trust the companies we store our lives on to take care of our data. A topic of discussion regarding the ethics of technology is just exactly how much data these companies really need and what they are doing with it. Another major cause for concern is the security of our personal data and privacy, whether it is leaked intentionally or not.

Large companies share our data constantly. In 2018, the U.S, government cracked down on Facebook selling user data to other companies after declaring that it had made the data in question inaccessible. One such case was in a scandal regarding Cambridge Analytica, in which Facebook sold user data to the company without consent from the users who's data was being accessed. The data was then used for several political agendas, such as the Brexit vote and the U.S. Presidential Election of 2016. In an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale described in detail how he used data taken from different social media websites to create ads that were both visually appealing to potential voters and targeted the issues that they felt strongest about.