Prepaid cell phones

Q. Prepaid cell phone service can protect privacy. One can buy a phone for cash and pay cash in advance for service. There are no billing records, and records of calls made on the phone are not linked to the owner. Cell phone carriers and governments in a few countries have considered ending prepaid phone service because criminals use it to avoid law enforcement agencies who cannot trace them. What are some legitimate uses for prepaid cell phones? Should prepaid cell phones be banned or otherwise controlled by law (i.e. require cell phone users to register their prepaid cell phones so they can be tracked)? Give your reasons.

As like it’s written in the question, prepaid cell phones service can protect privacy. There are no billing records and also the history of calls made on the phone is not linked to the owner. So criminals often abuse these benefits. Therefore, if criminals use these advantages of prepaid cell phones for their illegal activities, the governments and law enforcement organizations should sanction by making new laws about this and they can consider ending prepaid phone service.

However, in my opinion, it's too extreme to ban this service completely within a short period.  And if the government even says that if you still want to use prepaid cell phones, it has to be controlled by law, it becomes way more weird. Because that means the government organizations can require cell phone users to register their prepaid cell phones so they can be tracked. It's suspicious when the government says that from now on, for preventing crimes, we control the choices of payment of cell phones. Especially, if it's when it comes to privacy. The government cannot infringe the people’s privacy and cannot limit the citizen's choices under the name of arresting criminals, saying we're doing a good job.

According to the book “A gift of fire”, it says that data mining might be helpful for picking terrorists out of masses of consumer data, but appropriate procedures are essential to protect innocent but mistakenly selected people(Baase and Henry, p.90). In other words, by prohibiting prepaid cell phones service, it can put villains in jail. But when doing that, it’s more important to protect innocent people than just catching bad people.

Through this question, I got to know for the first time that prepaid cell phones can be used in a bad way but ironically at the same time, it can protect our privacy because it doesn’t make any past data of what we have done.

When I think about legitimate uses for prepaid cell phones, the first thing that came to my mind was just normal people who use various phone plans. You can use monthly plans which are automatically charged and withdrawn from the bank account so it’s really convenient and you don’t have to remember the day when you should pay your phone bills. So rather than prepaid cell phones which you have to buy a certain amount of minutes of access per month, people prefer to use monthly plans. On the contrary, in spite of that, some people like to use prepaid services because they can prevent unnecessary excessive consumption by paying in advance, though it can be a little bit cumbersome.

As a conclusion, my opinion between the government sanction and the prepaid cell phones is that the government can disallow the prepaid cell phones for prevention of crime by law, but at least they should make a room separately for ordinary people to choose other alternatives. And any usual citizen cannot be forced to register and to be tracked by the government with an unreasonable explanation.

Implantable Identifiers

Q.Veterinarians implant computer chips into pets and farm animals to identify and track them if they get lost. Some people suggest doing so for children. Discuss the privacy implications of such proposals. What are the risks? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Do parents have the right to have the chips implanted in their young children? How about in their teenage children? If the government proposed legally requiring ID chips in children under the age of 5, would you support it? Why or why not?

Depending on people, there are some who oppose this proposal but on the other hand, the
others agree with this suggestion. In my points of view, the main purpose of implanting identifiers especially among people who consent to it is for “just in case and an emergency.”

Let's say I implanted identifiers into my kids. Then after that, I can keep an eye on my
children all day long and keep tracking them where they went. And somewhat I can even predict what they did. It's almost the same that I'm being with them at every second and moment. Those can be helpful for especially parents to keep safe their children who are in danger if "just in case" really happens. However, the risk that I can imagine and I'm worried about is that someone can hack our location information and he/she can use it in a bad way. So identifiers in our bodies can make a situation even worse. For example, the computer chip is supposed to defend kids from dangers by following their pathways if it works properly, but rather maybe a kidnapper can hack the information and use it for kidnapping. So that’s why, in my opinion, the risks outweigh the benefits of implanting identifiers.

Privacy problems are also included in one of the risks. According to the book “A gift of
fire”, there are three key aspects of privacy(Baase and Henry, p.86).

First one is “freedom from intrusion.” Specifically, that means being left alone. From the first one, this computer chip violates the first key aspect of privacy. Although you have a chip in your body, you can think you’re alone without any interruption because it’s not the thing that someone watches and looks at you in person, right in front of you. But you should remember that this chip is operated by the computer. You cannot be alone at all. Like big brother, it can track you for 24 hours without notification.

The second one is “control of information about oneself.” As like I mentioned, this chip is managed by the computer and that means it can be interconnected with the other networks and the Internet. So it does not make sense from the beginning that you can control your personal information. You don’t have a choice once you put that chip into your body. It's the same that you say you're ready to share your location with others. It already becomes public information that you cannot control.

The last one is “freedom from surveillance.”- Not being followed, tracked, watched, and eavesdropped upon. It is not possible to be free from observation with computer-based chips.
As long as you keep the chip into your body, you would be better to think that you don't have privacy anymore and you're always being observed by someone though it looks like normal daily life and like nothing has happened.

Parents, they have the right to protect their children so they can consider inserting the
chip into their kids’ bodies as one of the ways. Let’s suppose that if my kids are less than 5, of course, I would be really concerned about something really wrong can be happened so I’m willing to do something to protect my children in advance. Or I might get help from the chip. But not this way of putting chips in my children in person like a barcode of a product. Instead, it would be better to educate them to be careful about wherever they go because the parents cannot follow their children forever by implanting those identifiers into their kids like this under the name of protection. Needless to say, teenagers are also in the same. Therefore, when I think what I have written above, even if the government proposed legally requiring ID chips in children under the age of 5, I’m going to deny this proposal. Because even though they’re parents and I understand they’re worried about their kids’ safety, they do not have the right to invade their children’s privacy.