Everyone needs to realize that the incredible power and convenience that comes with a smartphone also comes with a price with respect to privacy.

A bombshell New York Times report says that there's basically nothing you can do to prevent apps from tracking your every move https://t.co/FfCrfVTfRA

— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) December 11, 2018

We all understand the importance of border security these days and the importance of keeping dangerous people out of the country.

Yet this has also led to policies that can be very disturbing for the ordinary citizen. For example, authorities have the right to search your laptop when you’re entering the country. I’ve never experienced this but you can see how this will be used for travelers with high-risk profiles.

Which brings us to the story of a Canadian man who was charged at the Canadian border for not sharing the password from his phone upon returning from the Dominican Republic. Who knows why he refused – maybe he was partying with some hotties and had compromising photos. Maybe he really had something to hide. Or maybe like the rest of us he was appalled at the notion of border agents asking to browse through his phone.

Regardless, he’s in trouble now and the rest of us can only hope never to be in that situation.

The amount of surveillance we all face now in society is getting to be pretty alarming. Body cameras will only make things worse from a privacy point of view.

Still, this case of a hate crime quickly solved due to a surveillance camera coupled with one citizen using social media shows the power of technology in the face of senseless crimes.

The debate will rage as cameras become a bigger part of our lives at an exponential rate. Here we have the positives. There will be plenty of negatives as well.

The great surveillance debate is about to heat up again, as President Obama has proposed reforms to the FISA court process in an attempt to address the criticisms of the NSA surveillance program. It will be fascinating to see how this debate evolves. Many of the reforms seem to make sense and suggest a willingness to reach a consensus on this issue. Still, many critics were not impressed. We’ll see how this goes.

Things are getting interesting in California. Tech companies are fighting privacy advocates over a California bill that would require companies like Facebook, Google and other social networks to disclose to users the personal data the services have collected and with whom they have shared it. It doesn’t restrict what they can do, but the disclosure requirements are still very controversial and could be very expensive.