We Can’t Expect a Right to Privacy

13 Jan 2010 @ 4:34 PM

Personal privacy was a passing phase. You’re too young to remember but before the internet there was the gossip mill. Sure, gossip still exists but it doesn’t have the power it had in small towns. Civilization has gone through phases. Society has evolved from nomadic, through small town living, metropolitan, and finally an internet culture. The right to metropolitan privacy is not following us onto the computers and the internet.

According to history, not my personal memory, life was originally nomadic. People went where the food was plentiful. The biggest, worst, and meanest ruled. They took what they wanted so there was no trust. Reputations were gained and lost in battle, sometimes with each other. There was no right to privacy since there were no rights.

Then people settled in small towns where they knew each other from birth. Secrets spread through gossip mills like twitter storms. The only way to completely repair a damaged reputation was to leave everything behind. Then, as a stranger, you might rebuild trust by being a fast talker or spending years living properly. Some small communities, even today, never accept strangers.

Then the metropolis developed. It was no longer necessary to escape a reputation. People didn’t even know their neighbors. You could build a reputation by going around telling everyone what you wanted them to believe. They would tell others and the word would spread, but not very far. That may sound hard to believe or over simplified but that would be a whole new topic. The point is, it was easy to manipulate public opinion. People could keep their secrets and even crimes could go unpunished.

In the world today and probably more so each passing month, there are no secrets. A few years ago, for a moderate fee someone could pay an agency to discover almost everything about you. Today it only takes a quick search on the internet to find once private information about anyone. The other day I was online and discovered a list of the places I have lived over the last fifteen years. You should expect in today’s times that everyone could always know where you are.

With companies like Google making their fortunes discovering our secrets and selling them to the highest bidder or even giving them away for free we can expect that privacy is a thing of the past. We could try to boycott companies like Google, AOL, and Microsoft that do not respect our privacy but they lure us back with free toys and gadgets we can’t live without.

Maybe we should live our lives as if we were the center of the universe and everyone is watching us. Even secrets we think we keep today may be exposed in a couple years by some new technology we weren’t expecting. Maybe we should publish everything there is to know about solicitors and spammers. Make it easier to annoy the people who annoy us. We could put up the good fight and us the information from websites like this to protect our personal info as long as possible but the internet culture is winning.

Hal

Posted By: D'esprit Illusoire
Last Edit: 17 Jan 2010 @ 06:04 PM

Email • Permalink