As the world gets more complicated, it gets less safe. That’s the common wisdom, anyway. But what if we told you that as tech gets more advanced and more ingrained in our society, it can also make us safer than we have ever been? Here are just some of the ways that technology has improved our safety over the last 10 years or so.
Keeping Your Kids Safe
There are so many ways that technology has helped improve the safety of our kids and made protecting them easier. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of apps. At the most basic levels, you have parental control apps that allow parents to block certain types of websites and content from their kids (which is increasingly important as the adult entertainment industry gets more creative with its SEO).
There are also apps that can be synced across devices to enforce screen “curfews,” track your child’s location, monitor what he or she is doing and seeing online and via social media and text messages and get an idea of how they are spending their time when they are using their devices.
Keeping Yourself Safe
The days of having to fumble for your keys are long gone. Today you can unlock and even start your car via remote fobs. Some cars are also equipped with fingerprint scanners so that even if someone does manage to get your key fob away from you, they won’t be able to start your car. This same technology is available for the locks on the doors to your home. There are also apps for personal safety that will help you alert trusted loved ones and local authorities if you feel like your safety is being threatened.
Also Read
And, of course, we’ve all seen the news about how much closer we are getting to self-driving cars. Heck, even the cars we have now are “smart” and come with motion sensors, rearview cameras, etc.
Technology has even improved a person’s ability to protect their private information. Credit cards are now microchipped so that swiping and pins aren’t even needed. Heck, sometimes you don’t need the card at all, you can simply tap your phone on the sensor. There are also password safes and protectors that you can download for your computer.
Keeping Your Home Safe
Houses and their alarms have both gotten smarter. Today’s home security systems can monitor your home and send alerts to your mobile device if any of their sensors is triggered. This can allow you to check in on a disturbance even if you aren’t at home. And, in the event of a break-in it can help you hide from the intruders and let you track their movements.
These systems also come with monitoring for smoke and carbon dioxide and some can even turn off appliances that have been left on (or cut off power to the outlet in which an item has been left plugged in). They can sense your temperature, monitor and control your power usage. We’ve very close to all having our own Jarvises.
Keeping Your Computer Safe
Do you remember when there were only a couple of virus scanners available and you had to do most of the heavy lifting for your computer and Internet safety yourself? Those days are long gone. Now there is more tech than ever devoted to keeping our computers and our networks as safe as possible. Are there still breaches from time to time? Sure, but they aren’t nearly as frequent or as devastating as they could be in the late ’90s/early ’00s.
There are a lot of different factors in keeping yourself, your kids, your home and your devices safe from those who mean to harm. In today’s society, most of those factors are influenced by and controlled by technology and computers. So while, yes, the world might seem scarier now than it did when you were growing up, we are also probably the safest we’ve ever been — at least on a personal scale.
