Figure 1: They are watching you.
As we all know, the concerns about the privacy impacts of new technologies are nothing new. According to Schatz Byford‘s statement back in 1996 “at no time have privacy issues taken on greater significance than in recent years, as technological development shave led to the emergence of an ‘information society’ capable of gathering, storing an disseminating increasing amounts of data about individuals” (S. Trepte and L.Reinecke, 2011, p.33) [1]. As long as there is an existence of information technology, there would have privacy breaches at some levels. But recently, we have seen more and more scenarios where the more advanced technology is, the more it has violated or controlled our privacy directly or indirectly, or both. Let take a look at some recent examples as follows:
Being able to access 11 million children's details
According to the BBC News in 2009, the scrutiny of 390,000 trained professions is able to
access to 11 million children’s details (S. Trepte and L.Reinecke, 2011, p.34) [1].
Social Networking - Is it too charming for us to sacrifice our privacy?
According to Facebook’s statistics, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. If
you count one user as a potential privacy leakage, there would have 800 million cases.Even though Facebook is constantly improving its security and privacy model, but the amount of private information that Facebook is currently holding is nothing than scary and noteworthy.
SOPA - First attempt to control the whole Internet
For me, SOPA can be seen as the first attempt of high big power organization in order to control the whole Internet. To me, Internet denotes a freedom land, where I can freely do what I want to ethically because I pay for my Internet charges right. What happens if everything I do on the Internet, is being recorded?
Internet Eyes
According to their homepage info, from http://interneteyes.co.uk/, Internet Eyes is the system, which allows their members to spy on daily customers for financial profit. And short time after, there a flood of complains how Internet Eyes violates human privacy [2].
London - one of the world's CCTV capital
The number of CCTV cameras in the UK is around 1.85 million, an average of one camera for every 32 people in the UK. According to the Cheshire report, the average person on a typical day would be seen by 70 CCTV cameras [3].
...
My Thoughts
Are these technologies used to protect us (to entertainment us) or to watch over us? As we may agree, privacy is used to identify ourselves. What happens if we have no more control of our privacy, (or specifically our personal data)? What happens if our own privacy is not our own property anymore? What happens if we cannot identify ourselves if our privacy is lost, modified, or simply destroyed? What can we do to protect our privacy? ...
REFERENCE LIST
References are listed in the order they appear in the text, not in alphabetical order.
BOOK BY INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR
[ 1 ] S. Trepte and L.Reinecke, Privacy Online: Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure
in the Social Web, Springer, 2011.
ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 2 ] Big Brother Watch, “Internet Eyes Falls At The First Hurdle”, 2011;
http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2011/03/internet-eyes-falls-at-the-first-
hurdle.html#.Tygfrfn4Y7U.
ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 3 ] Wikipedia, “Closed-Circuit Television”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television.
FIGURE
Figure 1, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8792852/Watchdog-accused-of-burying-own-report.html
