Privacy in the 21st Century - Essay Example

Privacy In the 21st century, private information is easily available and privacy appears to have disappeared Introduction Privacy in the 21st century has raised a lot of debates. This is beacause people no longer experience the safe and private life that used to be earlier. The disappearing privacy is attributed to advances in technology. Privacy, despite all the talk, remains an elusive concept in our times. The use of social media, which highly jeoperdises privacy, is the norm today. In 2010, msnbc.com made a publication of a weeklong series in attempts to get the deepest feelings of the Americans about privacy. Sixty percent of the users, back then, agreed that privacy tended to slip away each day hence bothering them a lot. Things have changed a great deal since then. Information sharing in the social media has become the norm. It is the dominant way an internet user spends his or her time. Individuals surveyed by the Ponemon Institute suggest that privacy according to them ranges from a number of factors. Among them, fear of intrusion by the government, fear of being watched, worry over the tracking purchases of companies, or their physical movements being tracked by technology such as GPS. This paper discusses the arguments put forward about how privacy has disappeared in the 21st century. It depicts how contemporarily, private information is easily accessible. The paper also gives a counter argument and a rebuttal. The media exposes the privacy of many prominent individuals. Today, a celebrity can no longer keep his or her life private. The media is all over them sharing every bit of their lives with the public. The family of a celebrity is not safe from privacy intrition as well. The media does anything to expose the finest details about prominent and famous people. Before the 21st century, people wandered around easily and anonymously. Today, that is no longer possible. There are several implications put forward that made the privacy fade away. The implications include driver’s licenses, phone directories, social security numbers, revenue authority pins, cable TV and credit cards. People or systems know you by name, your phone number, and where you reside. The systems know the people we called and when we made the calls. They know what we have watched on the Television. They know the amount of money we have in our accounts and they also know where and how we spend the money. People made judgements of conveniences and advantages brought by the technological advances. They cocluded that the advantages outweighed the privacy-eroding annoyances. The internet and the web, on the other hand, shuttered the semblance of our anonymity that remained. The internet service provider (ISP) is the company that supplies us with the internet connection. The company knows the sites a person visited, the people that a person mailed and those that emailed back. Our judgement of the internet during its introduction was that the advantages of the internet outweighed the normal personal privacy paranoia. In the 21st century, a stranger can rummage through a person’s instant texts and messages without the permission of the owner. A stranger can reads your personal emails, or scan through the Web sites you visited. Secret cameras may spy on you in buildings you visit without your knowledge. A person can as well be traced by the help of computer chips planted in their cars, clothes or skin. The parties that might watch you without your consent may include your girlfriend, spouse, boss, a criminal, a cop or a marketing company. Whoever the persons are, they always see you in ways that you did not intend to be seen-this is hence the equivalence of being got naked in the 21st century. According to psychologists, boundaries are very healthy. “Psychologists tell us boundaries are healthy….” (Sullivan, 2006, page 1). It is essential to reveal yourself to your family, lovers and friends in stages at times that are appropriate. However, few boundaries are expected to remain. The ‘digital bread crumbs’ that people leave everywhere they go make it easier for a stranger to reconstruct who the people really are. It helps strangers to figure out where a person is and what a person likes. An ordinary Google search, in many cases, reveals what a person thinks. In the 21st century, people live in a world where they simply can never keep a secret. In the workforces, workers wear electronic tags for identification as they work. An employee has to wear a budge every time and everyway within the company. To add on that, his or her drawer is subjected to random searches. Supervisors call the random searches safety precautions. Companies also install surveillance devices all over to ensure that their employees are actually working as expected. Contemporarily, more than ever before, people witness the daily personal freedom and privacy erosion. People have become victims of privacy war that has been waged by business marketers, government eaves droppers and nosy neighbours. The war of privacy today has an intimate relationship with technological advancements. Technology that is unrestrained ends privacy. ”…. unrestrained technology ends privacy” (page 14, Garfinkel, 2000). The video cameras always observe people’s private moments. A computer stores personal private facts. Communications networks, on the other hand, make information that is personal available all over the world. As much as some technology of specialty is used in protecting the autonomy and personal information, technology’s overwhelming tendency is doing the reverse. Fundamentally, privacy is about the individual power. The story of the attack of technology on privacy, in several ways, is a depiction of how owners of institutions make use of technology in gaining control. Technology on its own is not able to violate the privacy of people or infringe on their personal information. It is always the people who use technology and the policies in place that violates the privacy of other individualsMany people believe that technology is in place because it has its lion share of advantages to the people than the privacy shortcomings. There are a lot of solutions brought about by technology. “…Privacy-shattering technology also solves more crimes….” (Wolpin, 2014, page 1). It is seen as a tool of solving crimes and aborting terrorism. The technology gathers a lot of information about what the government is and what exactly our politicians are or are not doing. Through the internet for example, a citizen is able to search for facts about his leaders. The media helps in exposing several stories about people that may be of importance to their followers. It exposes corruption, fuels pro-democracy movements globally and helps in toppling the regimes of totalitarianism. All those make the privacy bargain or technology less devilish. The social welfares help people a lot, and they need the numbers to be identified. Surveillance cameras have helped several governments in dealing with crimes. The credit cards help people when they have not carried solid cash with them. It is also safer and more efficient to use an electronic card when doing transactions than carrying cash. The internet has helped people to easily get access to services in a very short period. These views sound entirely plausible because they point out the advantages of the technological advances in the 21st century. However, it fails to acknowledge the importance of privacy and personal security. People cannot enjoy their lives freely if they know that someone is spying on them. Privacy is very important because there are things people are comfortable with if they remain secrets. Conclusion In conclusion, several persons argue that to be able to gain the modern society benefits, people must relinquish privacy to certain extend. If people, therefore, want to pay conveniently for meals, shopping and other services by credit cards then there is no other means but accept to surrender their privacy. Privacy however should not be taken for granted in the 21st century. It should be made a priority in daily endeavers. References Sullivan, B., 2006,Privacy under attack, but does anybody care? Retrieved May 7th 2015 from WolpinS., 2014,Why Privacy Is a 21st Century Myth. Retrieved May 7th 2015 from Garfinkel. S. 2000, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Sebastopol. O’Reilly & Associates. Read More