Week 2: Bumps in the Road

It's week 2 now! It feels like ages ago when I first applied to be a TRAIN scholar, but here we are!

So originally, I was going to do my research on Apple's controversial CSAM detection system in iCloud Photos (and why it was a bad idea) they were planning on implementing with the release of iOS 15, but then I checked my phone one morning, and I awoke to the beautiful sight of this headline:


Why'd you have to mess up my research, Tim?!

I don't mean to be selfish – this is great news, actually; there's now less worry of even more surveillance on our devices, and in the future they may cancel the feature entirely. I admire Apple for the sentiment behind this, I truly do, but no matter how many failsafes a backdoor may have, a backdoor is still a backdoor, and there will always be potential for exploitation by a government, whether it's that of the United States or elsewhere.

This news made me rethink my research a little more, not to mention the fact that finding papers and studies on something so new and ongoing is difficult to say the least. But, with the help of a research meeting, I established a new goal for my paper: 
Why focus on a single method of surveillance from one company when I could focus on industry-wide surveillance tactics/privacy concerns overall?

Some are paranoid about being tracked by "implanted microchips from vaccines" and 5G cell service, but why would any government need to implement something as sneaky as that when we use social media? Or the fact that nearly all of us carry at least one device with GPS signals, with facial and fingerprint scans, and that constantly backs itself up to the cloud? Or even the fact that websites and servers themselves regularly suffer from data breaches?

This just became a lot more interesting for me! I'm going to have to do even more research, but there are a plethora of sources regarding this topic, thankfully.

See you next week! Over and out.

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