The TED talks didn’t really bring anything new to the table for us, as anything they said were already discussed in our class. Their main goal was just to bring awareness to the issue of every company is doing something shady with your data and we should know that it is happening to be more conscious with our decisions when doing anything online. This was similar to how I felt about privacy policies when we first started talking about them, as I already knew companies were collecting as much information as they could about its users.
What I found most interesting was when we were asked to find all the information we could on another person in the class. It definitely made me feel dirty going through it, even though I didn’t find a whole lot, and what I did find I had no clue if it was accurate. Despite this feeling, I was still appalled to find next to no information on my partner, and him on me. What gave the most information was actually the state records, as we both managed to have previous traffic tickets.
Matthew Glancy's CS 4100 Blog 