Hi everyone, my name is Alan Yan and I am a fourth year geography student here at UVic. My area of concentration is in urban and development studies. It is my last term here at UVic and this course seems like an interesting one to finish my elective requirements with so I registered for it.

I am interested in the benefits and drawbacks of mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets. Mobile technologies have already influenced the way we design buildings and cities presently and no doubt cities of the future. For example in designing buildings today we take into account providing mobile infrastructure such as Wi-Fi connectivity and optimized LTE coverage. Mobile technologies may one day change the way we work so that planning cities around transportation and automobiles may be unnecessary. The increasing power and lowered cost of mobile technologies have helped to increase the rate of development tremendously by providing people in the global south with access to information and knowledge never possible before.

A topic that is of particular interest to me for possible class discussion is the topic of privacy and security. While technologies bring with them benefits to society and improvements in quality of life I believe that we should always be critical of how they treat our personal information and the ways in which technologies protect our personal data. With the recent news of the NSA surveillance program it is a great time to think about privacy and security in this age of new technologies and gadgets. A lot of people may say “I have nothing to hide” but it is not a matter of hiding anything bad but it is a matter of “not having anything in particular that I’d like to share” in the words of a security researcher named Mikko Hypponen who gave a Ted Talk aptly named – How the NSA betrayed the world’s trust — time to act.