Is technology an invasion of privacy - Essay Example

The development of science in equipping the authority with methods of spying is not expected to end with wiretapping. Brand eisprescient and haunting words evidently apply nowadays, as the mark between science fiction and science is incessantly redrawn. This paper will show how technology is an invasion of privacy. Contemporary technologies for amassing personal information that surpass the physical, freedom enhancing restrictions of the ancient means are relentlessly appearing. They prod more deeply, extensively and quietly than traditional techniques, transcending obstructions (whether distance, walls, darkness, time or skin) that historically sheltered personal data.

The boundaries that have defined as well as given authenticity to social groups, systems and the individual are progressively permeable lacking special validity. The influence of private and governmental organizations to coerce disclosure (whether centered on circumstance, technology, or law) and to collect, analyze and disseminate personal data is growing swiftly(Lyon& Zureik 45).The world is converting into a transparent community of record in that documentation of the history, present identity, location, physiological and communication, and psychological behavior and states is more and more possible through technology, and people’s privacy is no longer private.

With extrapolative DNA and profiles, there are even alleges to being able to see individual futures. Collection of information often ensues invisibly, remote and automatically-being fabricated into routine undertakings. Awareness and unpretentious approval on the involvement of the individual might be lacking. The extent of personal data collected is increasing. Fresh technologies hold the capacity to disclose the unknown, unseen, withheld or forgotten. Like the unconscious or the atom discovery, they reveal tads of reality, which were previously concealed, or did not encompass informational clues.

Individuals are in a way turned inside out (Foucault 23). To be living as well as a social individual is to give off inevitably signals of continuous information-whether into the mode of heat, motion, pressure, brain waves, cells, perspiration, olifacteurs, sound, garbage, or waste matter, and more acquainted forms, for instance, visible behavior and communication. These fragments are awarded new connotation by modern surveillance technologies, thereby invading peoples’ privacy. In a value-added, hotchpotch process, machines (regularly with only a slight aid from their support system) may discover significance in combining and surfacing heretofore futile data (Lyon& Zureik 45).

The proportion of what persons know concerning themselves (or are able to know) vs. what experts and outsiders can know about them has budged away from the person. Data in varied forms from extensively separated geographical regions, establishments and times can be certainly merged and examined. In comparatively unrestrained fashion, fresh (and old) establishments are capturing, merging and vending this data, or placing it to unique internal usages (Laudon 90). Technology is an invasion of privacy through the fresh information technologies that encompasses larger issues concerning the multifaceted inter-relations of society and technology;