With the advancements in technology, various inventions and applications have been made that are being used to monitor and track people and their day-to-day chores as well as their whereabouts. In some of the cases, this is being done voluntarily by the concerned parties and in some, this is being done involuntarily without the knowledge of the person being tracked or monitored. So, the question arises here: “Does tracking and monitoring hamper privacy or acts as a boon in emergency situations?”
Nowadays, mobile phones have become an integral part and parcel of our everyday life. There are various applications like facebook, camera, google maps in our mobiles that ask for allowing privacy settings. Through these, they can track and monitor our interests like favourite songs or movies, something we need to buy and also track our current location. In many of the cases, these help us a lot and save our time. With location tracking feature in google map, we can reach some desired location faster with instructions from google. There are applications that can track our heart rate too and help us in crucial situations by preventing heart attacks and other health issues. Apart from these, security cameras installed in our homes help us provide real-time information and images.
But, the issue begins when we are unaware that we are being tracked. Sometimes, people unknowingly allow all the privacy settings and this creates the ruckus. The main problems are the hampering of our privacy, disclosure of useful informations and breach of security in some cases. In bad circumstances, data hackers can get these and this in turn has catastrophic impacts both for an individual as well as for large institutions.
To summarise, although the disadvantages of unknown monitoring cannot be ignored, but its advantages are outweigh them. As the saying goes, “No omelettes cannot be made without breaking a few eggs”, similar is the case here. We have to be mindful as an individual and be conscious whenever we are tracked or not.