The world is changing rapidly. There used to be a time when we could be confident that no one could learn too much about our personal lives. There used to be a time when information was merely a way of keeping records. That time is gone and with it went a large amount of what we might call our personal privacy. Information about our personal lives has now become one of the most valued resources on the market today. The explosion of the computer and communications industries has created a system that can store vast amounts of data on an individual and transmit that information almost anywhere in a negligible amount of time. More and more people are gaining access to this information and the government has been too slow to react to the changes. As a result, employers, insurance agencies, law enforcement officers, and researchers are all lobbying for legislation that would establish clear rules for the access to this information. Each of these groups stand to gain enormous benefits from legitimizing access to a broad base of personal information. This information will be organized into vast databases that will be maintained by the government, credit report agencies, the health care industry, and employers. The system will come to contain information on virtually every aspect of our lives, the data will be quickly and efficiently transferred around the globe via the arising Global Information Infrastructure, and paper records sitting in file cabinets will become a thing of the past. However, considering current trends, what may be missed the most from the old system are the locks on those old, rusted file cabinets. This new system allows for a lot of access to previously confidential files and we are already seeing the negative effects that this system has produced. For example, employers and insurance companies have begun to discriminate against individuals based on samplings of a person’s or fetus’s DNA. As genetic testing and the human genome project advance, there will be an even greater opportunity for discrimination based on characteristics or conditions that may, or may not, arise in an individual's future. To provide a background to the discussion, this report will establish who has access to what information today.
The personal connection Americans have with their phones, tablets, and computers; and the rising popularity of online shopping and social websites due to the massive influence the social media has on Americans, it is clear why this generation is called the Information Age, also known as Digital Age. With the Internet being a huge part of our lives, more and more personal data is being made available, because of our ever-increasing dependence and use of the Internet on our phones, tablets, and computers. Some corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook; governments, and other third parties have been tracking our internet use and acquiring data in order to provide personalized services and advertisements for consumers. Many American such as Nicholas Carr who wrote the article “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty, With Real Dangers,” Anil Dagar who wrote the article “Internet, Economy and Privacy,” and Grace Nasri who wrote the article “Why Consumers are Increasingly Willing to Trade Data for Personalization,” believe that the continuing loss of personal privacy may lead us as a society to devalue the concept of privacy and see privacy as outdated and unimportant. Privacy is dead and corporations, governments, and third parties murdered it for their personal gain not for the interest of the public as they claim. There are more disadvantages than advantages on letting corporations, governments, and third parties track and acquire data to personalized services and advertisements for us.
Scrolling through my Facebook feed on my iPhone, casually looking at my friend’s pictures statuses and updates, I came across a video with an amusing title. I tapped the play button expecting the video to load. Instead, I was redirected to an app asking permission to access my “public information, pictures and more.” I then realized; what I considered to be “private information” was not private anymore. Privacy is becoming slowly nonexistent, due to the invasion of advertising companies and the information we publicly post in the online world. In the essay “The Piracy of Privacy: Why Marketers Must Bare Our Souls” by Allen D. Kanner remarks, how major companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft get billions of transmissions each year on
The rapid growth in technology has been impressive over the past 20 years from television graphics and multi-purpose phones to world-wide connections. Unfortunately, the government is having trouble with this growth to protect the people from having their privacy violated due to the information being stored electronically. In “The Anonymity Experiment”, by Catherine Price, states how easily a person can be track and how personal can be lost. Also, in “Social Security and ID theft”, by Felipe Sorrells, states how social security numbers and personal identities can be stolen and how the government is trying to stop that theft. They both intertwine with technology and privacy though Price's article has a broad overview of that, while Sorrells's focus is mainly on social security number and identity thief part. Price and Sorrells shows that companies are taking too much advantage from the customer, the government, even though their trying, needs to start helping the people protect their privacy, and a balance between the amount of trust people should have giving out their sensitive records to which information is protected.
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”(Benjamin Franklin). Privacy is considered a civil liberty issue. It reflects the American fundamental values such as civil liberties, limited government, and individualism. It covers the whole range of civil liberties spectrum and it holds every aspect of our life. It plays a major role on our daily lives and it is also a main structure in the future of democratic political system (Wemmer, 2012.) Privacy has evolved overtime, privacy can be interpreted from the First ,Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, Fourteenth Amendments in the Constitution; however Americans don’t consider the importance of privacy until cases such as Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479, 1965), Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113, 1973), Mapp v. Ohio (367 U.S. 643, 1961) are brought to the court.
We are living in world that is growing in technology. Technology is evolving so rapidly, especially in ways that allow us to store personal information. For example, we can look up a purchase with no receipt at a retail store with a swipe of a credit card. Another example, we could go to the doctor and the nurse can print out a copy of all our health records that are stored in the computer by just typing in our full name. Although this may be a way to make things easier for us, it is also a way for people to take our information without permission and do what they please with it. People can hack into the database of retail stores and steal account numbers and people can just say your name and get your health history if the nurse does not ask for a form of identification. Information privacy is a growing concern for Internet and data users. In a report Protecting Privacy in an Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public, researched by Helen Nissenbaum of Princeton University, she states:
Constitution, the founding fathers recognized that citizens in a democracy need privacy for their ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects.’ That remains as true as ever, but our privacy laws have not kept up as technology has changed the way we hold information.”
The word “privacy” did not grow up with us throughout history, as it was already a cultural concept by our founding fathers. This term was later solidified in the nineteenth century, when the term “privacy” became a legal lexicon as Louis Brandeis (1890), former Supreme Court justice, wrote in a law review article, that, “privacy was the right to be let alone.” As previously mentioned in the introduction, the Supreme Court is the final authority on all issues between Privacy and Security. We started with the concept of our fore fathers that privacy was an agreed upon concept that became written into our legal vernacular. It is being proven that government access to individual information can intimidate the privacy that is at the very center of the association between the government and the population. The moral in...
Ever since day one, people have been developing and creating all sorts of new methods and machines to help better everyday life in one way or another. Who can forget the invention of the ever-wondrous telephone? And we can’t forget how innovative and life-changing computers have been. However, while all machines have their positive uses, there can also be many negatives depending on how one uses said machines, wiretapping in on phone conversations, using spyware to quietly survey every keystroke and click one makes, and many other methods of unwanted snooping have arisen. As a result, laws have been made to make sure these negative uses are not taken advantage of by anyone. But because of how often technology changes, how can it be known that the laws made so long ago can still uphold proper justice? With the laws that are in place now, it’s a constant struggle to balance security with privacy. Privacy laws should be revised completely in order to create a better happy medium between security and privacy. A common misconception of most is that a happy medium of privacy and security is impossible to achieve. However, as well-said by Daniel Solove, “Protecting privacy doesn’t need to mean scuttling a security measure. Most people concerned about the privacy implications of government surveillance aren’t arguing for no[sic] surveillance and absolute privacy. They’d be fine giving up some privacy as long as appropriate controls, limitations, oversight and accountability mechanisms were in place.”(“5 Myths about Privacy”)
The world erupted in outrage following revelations by Edward Snowden regarding the extent of surveillance perform by the National Security Agency. Privacy becomes one of the hottest topic of 2013 and was chosen by the world’s most popular online dictionary, Dictionary.com, as the Word of the Year. However, the government is not the only one that conduct data gathering and surveillance. Employers often monitor their employees, and businesses collect data on theirs customer. The morality of these practices is a topic that generates heated debate.
...onal privacy dead?” brings up many other questions along with it. But there is no doubt that the government is doing all of what they are doing for safety reasons. They claim to want to make the United States as safe as possible, and this has proved to ring true in many situations. But now the inevitable new question becomes: How far is too far? Is safety more important than privacy? To know these answers, one must ask themselves and know their own opinion on the situation. But whatever their answers may be, and despite the multiple other questions that are brought up along with the topic of personal privacy, there is still one thing that is known for sure: personal privacy is dead. And unless the use of technology becomes less critical to the United States, personal privacy will always be dead. The bigger the role technology has; the less personal privacy there is.
As technology as advanced, so has our society. We are able to accomplish many tasks much easier, faster, and in effective ways. However, if looked at the harmful impact it has had on the society, one can realize that these are severe and really negative. One of the main concerns is privacy rights. Many people want that their information and personal data be kept in secrecy, however with today’s technology, privacy is almost impossible. No matter how hard one tries, information being leaked through technological advancements have become more and more common. With personal information being leaked, one does not know exactly how the information will be used, which validates the statement that privacy rights have been diminishing and should be brought to concern. Many people do not realize that their information is being used by third-parties and to consumer companies. In conclusion, technology has had a significant effect on privacy
Perhaps the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, said it best when he claimed that privacy is no longer a “social norm.” Virtually everyone has a smart phone and everyone has social media. We continue to disclose private information willingly and the private information we’re not disclosing willingly is being extracted from our accounts anyway. Technology certainly makes these things possible. However, there is an urgent need to make laws and regulations to protect against the stuff we’re not personally disclosing. It’s unsettling to think we are living in 1984 in the 21st century.
Privacy in Cyberspace Computers and the Internet have changed many things in the world today. People surf the web on a daily basis for information and entertainment. The Internet is making things like paying your bills from home a possibility. This was something that you had to leave the house to do, even if it was just dropping a check in the mail. Now you can pay your bills and buy your groceries, with everything being just a point and a click away.
Computers; they are a part of or in millions of homes; they are an intricate part of just about every if not all successful businesses, the government, and the military. Computers have become common place in today’s society and the lives of the people who live in it. They have crossed every national, racial, cultural, educational, and financial barrier, which consequently ushered in the information age. A computer is a programmable electronic device that can store, retrieve and process data, and they come in all shapes, and sizes. They can be used for and in just about anything. As stated before, they are used in just about every aspect of modern society. They are so fundamental to modern society that it would be disastrous to society without them. As stated before, there are many areas in modern society that are run by computers. They play an intricate part of millions of homes in the world. Office workers in business, government and the military may use them to write letters, keep rosters, create budgets, find information, manage projects, communicate with workers, and so on. They are used in education, medicine, music, law enforcement, and unfortunately crime. Because computers have become such a part of the world and how it operates, there is a tremendous responsibility for those who are in control of these computers and the vital information that they carry, to manage and protect them properly. This is management and protection is vital because any loss or damage could be disastrous for the affected entity. For example, a mistake or intentional alteration of a personal credit file could affect ones ability to buy a car or home, or can lead to legal actions against the affected person until the mistake or intentional alteration has been corrected. Therefore, with the advent of computers in the information age, and all of the intentional and unintentional violations against them, comes the need to safeguard them and the information they carry with strong systems and policies of computer security.
This world has changed, even as 20 years old, I am afraid of where technology is going already everyone is glued to it; as a kid computers were new, but we didn’t care we played outside, and cell phones were for emergencies, not fun. Due to technology privacy almost doesn’t exist in this day of technology anymore, there are secret spy cameras being placed in homes by jealous friends or family; social media sites pushing you to spill your age, looks, feelings, life story, and more, and “Big Brother” and “Little Brother” everywhere. Everyone has to be careful because everywhere there is someone trying to steal someone’s identity whether the reason is for money, for legality in a new country, or even to hide a past troubled life. Privacy in the world has been, is now, and always will be extremely important. Growing up in school after getting my first cell phone I was fascinated with new technology and couldn’t wait for the next cell phone to be released. I was always highly interested in what was next, but that was then when I was a young and obvious little kid, now as a young adult in this day of age I have an entirely different feel for all of it; privacy no longer exists and technology is the primary blame.