Com125 Qotw6: Privacy

The British sociologist Anthony Giddens has described the ways that citizens in a risk society can no longer rely on tradition or fixed hierarchies to establish their identity or to give them reliable guidance about whom to trust in a society of strangers. Confused and anxious about status in a world where status is constantly shifting, we feel increasing pressure to expose details of our personal lives to strangers in order to win their trust, and we demand that they expose themselves in order to win our trust in return. (Rosen, 2004) Examples of these “exposures” are like when you register online for a free E-mail account- they would ask personal questions like what is your name and your date of birth. My question to these questions would be, “how are they even relevant to what I am subscribing for?” Personally, I believe that my online identity must be kept as a secret, or rather not revealing every part of my body to the naked crowd.

Psychologists tell us boundaries are healthy, that it is important to reveal yourself to friends, family and lovers in stages, at appropriate times. However, few boundaries remain. The digital breadcrumbs you leave everywhere make it easy for strangers to reconstruct who you are, where you are and what you like. In some cases, a simple Google search can reveal what you think. Like it or not, increasingly we live in a world where you simply cannot keep a secret. (Sullivan, 2006) We have to be clear with the conjunction of revealing myself to my friends and families and the revealing myself online towards people I don’t even know, who claimed to be your “friends”.
Privacy invasion is not just happening on the internet- in fact, do you even know that you are being spied on online and offline? In America, the legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding personal sousveillance are largely yet-to-be-explored, but let us consider a simple parallel example, namely the recording of telephone conversations. Telephone tapping is the monitoring of telephone and Internet conversations by a third party, often by covert means. In America, such activities are very common. What is amazing is that a simple conversation with your friend is being exposed on the papers the very next day and everyone is talking about it- the best part is you do not even know about it. Even on business today, people are being spied on, for example, Hewlett Packard executives hiring private investigators to spy on employees and journalists. ( Sullivan, 2006).
The invasion of privacy is like an on-going trend that is spread around the globe- I think it is even faster than the SARS. Certainly, people just do not want to be left behind and instead following the trends- especially Singaporeans. For example, I saw a website in the internet. It is about Singaporeans with their hand phone, going around and taking videos. With respect to the first video on the website, it is about a dispute between two people over a car accident. However, the most hilarious thing I realize upon watching the video is that- the one who is taking the video is the main culprit of the accident. (Posted by Kevin, 2006)
The internet has vastly increased the opportunities for individuals to subject themselves to the demands of the personality market, resulting in ever increasing confusion and anxiety about how much of ourselves to reveal to strangers. (Rosen, 2004) We must be careful with what we do in and off the internet. The bottom-line is, never to reveal too much of yourself when you are unsure of the circumstances.

References:

Rosen, J. (2004). The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age, Random House.

Sullivan, B. (17th October, 2006). "Privacy Lost: Does Anyone Care?". Retrieved on 8th March, 2007 from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221095/print/1/displaymode/1098/

Sousveillance. (2007, February 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 9, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Internet Website Posted by Kevin: http://philiptiongson.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/12/singapores_aunt.html
benbasket at 6:09 AM