Why Privacy Matters

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The word privacy is thrown around so much it’s kind of hard to understand what it truly means. As a high school student, one hears a lot of stories with the word privacy in them. A girl tells her best friend a secret and the next day the whole school knows about it. Then everyone hears the girl complain about how much of an invasion of privacy that the whole situation is. Many people would agree with this. These people would probably say that what one wants to stay private, should do so. These people aren’t exactly wrong but they aren’t really right either. Most people think that privacy is what people know about another person, regardless of how they get the information but it’s actually all about what the individual decides what everyone else knows. Once one puts information out there, that person can no longer trust that the information will not be spread. In a recent TED talk called “Why Privacy Matters”, Alessandra Acquisti mentioned a study he did all about social media websites. In the past years, these kind of websites have become very popular. Anyone can easily find old friends or new love interests and what they like, where they go and so many other things about them. But, according to Professor Acquisti’s study, people should start to think twice about the information they put on these websites. He talks about how through information people put on these websites, hackers and other companies can get a lot of information about them which can be scary because most people can never know what they can do with that. However, in a way, one allows that information to be out there because they put it out there. It’s all about responsibility. Every person liable to what they say to others and what they put on the internet. Last year, a man named Edward Snowden found that “...even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded”. After this happened the concept of “privacy” was talked about a lot. The American people were up in arms about the fact that simple things like our call records are being seen by the government, and the government was upset that the information they wanted to keep private was leaked. The problem is that both of these parties are in the wrong. Honestly, it’s not really a big secret that someone besides the user can see what they’re doing on their phone.

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