Privately Speaking

The idea of privacy is kind of an abstract idea because the only time privacy is controlled I

would imagine is in your mind during private thought. Everything else outside of your mind has the potential of being exposed on multiple levels. For example a conversation with a friend is vulnerable to being exposed to others then you and your friend, let’s imagine this conversation takes place in a coffee shop, while you might think that you are having a private conversation, left out there for all to hear while they are invited to or not. This conversation could take place on the telephone and still wouldn’t really be private because of a few possible things that could interfere, one is possible ear droppers on either side of the conversation, and also some believe that the government is hearing our “private” telephone conversations, other aspects might be one of those involved in the conversation could possibly carry on the conversation or aspects of the conversation with others. So what does this all mean? In my opinion I believe that privacy and the ideas of what is private is changing, some information is no longer private because of the internet and how accessible it is. Information like your contact information is almost always accessible if you search for it by name, also I believe that if you search hard enough you can also find out where someone works and what they look like. So what does this mean? To me this means that, anything that we associate with on a face level is not private, anything that we voice whether vocally or electronically is not private, and anything that we release outside of our internal thoughts is not private. I saw a video called "Do young people care about privacy?" it is about a group of engineers who are creating an App to keep track of your private information, however, I can’t help to think of what would happen if their systems get hacked? I think that it is important to understand that we are being followed in a way; every step we take online is traced every item we view or entertain buying will continue to hunt us until we either give in or move on to something else. So What? I think that it is time to accept what kind of environment we live in and learn how to best protect ourselves against the wrong use of our information rather than pretend that we can actually control our information from the internet…IMPOSSIBLE! What counts is the integrity of our information and what it is used for. As of right now we have some options with what we choose to participate in on the internet, and whom we wish to participate with. This is important because we need to control our environments in order to hold any control of our information. Facebook is not evil and neither is advertising tactics to trace your moves and continue to intrude your cyber space, it is expected that all aspects of our lives will evolve and expand just as the internet expands, this is not news. Why should we expect any less, if it is possible wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you use all your resources in hopes of increasing the results of your business? I would. I don’t get mad at the advertisements in my inbox, I don’t get mad knowing that somebody could find my address by conducting a research, I think we feel most exposed when our personal space is invaded in our presence, if all of a sudden we are made aware of how vulnerable we are when a stranger reaches out to us, we instinctually feel threatened. Imagine this,if a stranger walks onto your driveway while you are not home, now how different would you feel if you were home?