Privacy Security

Benjamin Franklin once said: “ They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.“ Today, we may agree or disagree with Franklin’s quote, but we do have one thing in common: just as Franklin, we are still seeing freedom vs. security as a zero-sum game – one where one can gain only at the expense of another and where the two cannot possibly coexist. However, this is not necessarily the case. There does not have to be necessarily a trade-off between privacy and security; the proper balance is the one where neither security nor privacy suffers from both of them being present in our daily lives.

The main reason we still share the opinion with Franklin is mostly because the majority of the governments, either by having too little or too much power, fail to provide citizens with both privacy and security. They either provide only one or, in some extreme cases, none of the two. However, there are some good examples of how government can, by having just enough power, and by creating a system which provides for checks and balances, give its citizens the freedoms they are entitled to, while making them feel secure at the same time.

The paper will deal with two aspects of the privacy-vs-security issue. The first one is concerned with general civil liberties, where privacy is understood to mean freedom to make personal (private) choices in our own homes, control our daily lives and decide with whom we share information that is of our concern – information about our emotions, attitudes, behavior and future decisions and events. The second aspect deals with the privacy vs. security on the internet. Since we live in a technological era, internet has become an inseparable part of our l...

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...re of this fact. Yet, we still like to think of what we do on the internet as our own business, and we do not like governments searching through our Gmail accounts or recording our video chats. It somehow does not seem wrong when Amazon does it – after all, we are the ones who willingly create an account knowing that Amazon will have an insight in what we buy, what we want to buy and what we need, even when we ourselves are not aware that we need it.

The difference here is that we know in what way and what information Amazon will store and use. We also believe that this information will be used to benefit us, and when we have such an attitude we are more willing to give out the necessary information. On the other hand, we are usually not able to understand why would the government need our data in the first place, and then for what purposes would it use that data.