Privacy is something everyone is entitled to no matter who they are. Privacy is me wanting to be alone in my room, without my roommate, watching what i want on TV, painting my nails on my bed, and chatting with my friend on the phone about my horrendous Saturday night i would love to forget. Private, deriving from privacy is something that is meant to be known only to the person that is doing the private act, or aware of their private information, such as chatting with a boyfriend, or your credit card account number. Whether or not someone can prevent their privacy being invaded by someone else, is the problem at hand. The Internet is a large community that involves money transactions with account information, personal thoughts or beliefs, personal information,peoples' personal health issues and much more information on any human being that is putting it out there, usually unknowingly, for anyone to see.
Some of the biggest privacy problems posed by the Internet are that just about anyone, with the right directions can hack into almost anyone's Internet history, and one of the biggest problems of all is that we, as a society have absolutely no problem feeding these hackers our personal information, things we would not even tell a best friend, or family member in some cases. With everything from Webshots Community, to Myspace, where you don't need to be a member to see someones homepage, hackers or anyone who doesn't even have necessarily bad intentions can get images of us and personal information from hobbies, to our own birthdays. In "Privacy Lost: Does anybody care?", Bob Sullivan makes these privacy issues clear. "The digital bread crumbs 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 ("Privacy Lost: Does anybody care?" Sullivan).
I've always thought that the Internet was a little shady in the privacy department, but for some reason I never really gave it any though until this posting. What the hell was I thinking??? There is absolutely no privacy on the Internet, even secured pages I'm sure, can be hacked into. I worry about my Internet privacy, and most importantly with my 5 year old membership to Webshots Community. I made an album on Webshots 5 years ago, and haven't updated it since. I use to post it in my AIM profile so that my friends could just click on a link, and there they were, no password needed to view my public albums. After the pictures got old, new styles were in, and I realized that hair cut I had sophomore year of high school was hideous, I removed the link from my profile, so that no one could see those pictures. To this day, I swear, I STILL get e-mails in my Hotmail account confirming "34 new views of your webshot albums this week". CREEPY!!! I KNOW that my friends aren't looking at these pictures, I don't have the link available for them anymore and I know that my "spaced out" friends would never remember the link address to get to them. So this means, anyone, ANYONE, can be looking at my pictures, old men in their underwear sitting behind the screen, or 10 year old children looking at me funneling a beer. Why don't I just delete my account? That is a good idea, and in fact I am on the website now, doing JUST that, I never took the time to actually think that my pictures of me in my own home doing whatever with my friends is available to anyone on the Internet, anywhere in the world. So is there really "Internet privacy"? Well, according to Wikipedia's article on the matter, they provide the following statements, "Experts in the field of Internet privacy have a consensus that Internet privacy does not really exist" ("Internet Privacy" Wikipedia). Well holy Internet, aren't we all in trouble then?
Privacyrights.org make a clear and true point, "But with acceptance comes a decrease in skepticism. You may assume that the same laws or societal rules that protect your privacy in the physical world apply to the digital world as well. But the Internet remains largely unregulated and the policies governing it underdeveloped. As you continue to embrace the technology it is important to be aware that in many ways it is still uncharted territory" (Privacyrights.org "Privacy in Cyberspace"). This is exactly the case with me, right off the bat of my Internet journey I felt completely at ease, and very secure in my actions on the web. But now, I am older than when I started using the Internet. I make transactions, I have online banking, and I have a Facebook and Myspace account. I need to make sure that I am not putting my whole self out there, because after all, what will i have left of myself to keep private? The Internet is slowly devaluing people's privacy. Just like I don't like someone down the hall barging into my room when I am doing COM 125 homework, or on the phone with my mother talking about a weird rash (humor), I don't want someone hacking into my account history on store websites, or using information they found on me from myspace to locate where I live. Internet Privacy. It's a bitch.
"Internet Privacy." Wikipedia. 11 Feb. 2007. Wikipedia. 15 Feb. 2007
"Privacy in Cyberspace." Privacy Rights Clearing House. Oct. 2006. Privacy Rights Clearing House. 15 Feb. 2007
Sullivan, Bob. "Privacy Lost: Does Anybody Care Anymore?" MSNBC.Com. 17 Oct. 2006. Technology Correspondent. 15 Feb. 2007
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