Five Ways You Could Be Snooped On In 2014
PHOTOGRAPHS
A big treasure-trove of information is the set of photos you upload on to social media sites like Facebook - and their metadata.
Many mobile phones and cameras tend to location-tag photos. Your photos record time and location, usually from GPS data.
This could let outsiders pinpoint the exact location of, say, your kids at different times of the day.
So disable location-tagging of your photos.
Even then, photos will reveal a great deal about you, your friends, the places you go to, the things you do. Take care to not share your online photo albums too freely - keep their viewing rights restricted.
PHONE TAPPING
The most popular way to snoop, in the movies. The most cumbersome, in real life.
Designated officials in the Indian agencies that have the mandate to snoop have to file a request with their heads, with details of the target, and why the tapping is necessary. The head then applies to the home secretary for permission under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. And unlike with CDRs, it can never be done post facto in India. It needs advance preparation and time. And it needs manpower - to listen in.
In the United States, the NSA uses a great deal of technology for call monitoring. It reportedly stores every telephone call, and it scans samplings of calls (or specific groups of calls) for patterns and trigger words. Storing the calls allows it to go back in time and scan for something later.
India, too, has embarked on a massive surveillance technology program called CMS, which aims to gather data from phone calls and the internet, for every citizen.
How well this will work is difficult to say, but it's certain to collect way more data on you, the citizen, than on terrorist and criminals.
And what is as clear is that surveillance of citizens, by Governments, is going to get bigger in 2014.
And that if you're using any kind of electronic medium for communicating, you're a target for snooping.
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