Lack of Privacy
Privacy is something every human being thrives on. However, at the same time, we are social by nature. If deprived of company, people can become quite unsettled. It goes back to our most primal instincts: to have company is to survive, while to be alone is to perish. Despite these instincts, humans still love their privacy. In today’s society with the abundance of invasive technology, this is no easy task.
Consider a website people use every day: FaceBook. FaceBook is one of many social networking sites, places where people go to communicate with one another and nourish the social side of their lives. On this website, information trading takes place. Some of this is quite personal, and only directed towards people the user deems as “friends”. However, when FaceBook changed their privacy settings in May of 2010, pretty much anybody with an Internet connection could view your profile and content. In the time since then, have you changed your privacy settings? Probably not; it is not something most people think about when on their pages.
These privacy settings are simply not something on your mind when you are surfing your friend’s pages. There is the obvious threat of posting a “going out of town” message, and having a burglar see this and take advantage. Another more insidious threat is the predator who pours through your posts looking for information on your habits, or worse yet, the habits of your children. With enough time and information, they can paint a fairly detailed picture of your life which can be used against you.
Another, even bigger website is also coming under public scrutiny. Google, arguably the world’s largest search engine, has been compiling pictures of the entire world, called “Google StreetView”. This sounding has an innocent purpose: to locate streets for use in help with navigation. However, their technology produces some sketchy photos. People are caught in compromising positions, and the photos are online, frozen for everyone to see.
This surveillance goes on in real life too: an interesting statistic reads that you are captured on camera an average of two-hundred times a day in America, three-hundred times for the United Kingdom! Coupled with government scanning and intercepting phone calls and other communications, and a newly founded “National DNA Database”, our lives are losing their privacy every minute. Remember, we are social beings, and need to be social beings, but our privacy is a right. To lose our privacy would be to lose an essential part of ourselves, so beware online and in real life, and keep a firm grip on your right to privacy.
