Nicholas Pifer CS 4100 Senior Seminar

 I suppose I'm most interested in what the NSA has been doing after the whole Snowden incident. Overall, I think I'm mostly interested in it as it has immediate real world affects that is happening right now. Did they actually do anything to alleviate the public outrage? Is what they did just a cop-out solution that doesn't actually do anything? Is there anything being done to get them to actually stop doing stuff like this? Is that an actual solution or is it just another cop-out?

 So I live up a road that has quite a bit of tree coverage that is right next to all the power lines. Due to this, when the wind started knocking down trees, those trees started to fall on the power lines. The power didn't come back till just under 3 weeks later so any technology using electricity pretty much played no role in my experience(other than the lack of it making me extremely bored). The only technology that really had an impact was the gas stove(if you can call it technology, it's kind of just setting gas on fire) as it was used quite frequently to make food and boil water. Other than that, technology didn't really do much till the trees were cleared a week later and then it was just to say I'm not dead and stuck under a tree when I went into Boone for cell service. 

 Ultimately, none of the information we looked at regarding data privacy came as a surprise to me. I already knew that companies would get a lot of data from individuals who are using their applications and the extent(for some companies) of the amount of different data that they collect. There was at least one case where I wasn't aware of just how much data a company would collect. TikTok, while not something I use, was one of the companies that really ramped up how much data they collected. It was said in class some of the things they get, which for the most part was standard, but then it got to how they would take all of the contact info from you phone and collect that(phone numbers, emails, names.) In some ways it's not that crazy as it is a way they can connect you to people on your contacts that use Tiktok, but I really doubt that's all they use it for. Then on the other side of the spectrum is Steam(Valve). Pretty much all they get from you is data so they can identif...