The Internet’s Impact on Privacy
The Internet has firmly taken root in America and now is involved and vital in every aspect of life. For the first time ever, there is a medium at which organizations can build a career base and reach their clientele at minimum cost. People can connect over chatting, whether it be text or actually web cam directed, and interact and have fun online. People’s social lives now exist predominately on the Internet, though MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, etc. The Internet isn’t all good however, and this is easily recognizable. It is safe to say though the biggest wound it has inflicted is the one on people’s individual privacy.
People post to much stuff on the Internet, and it never deletes itself. Although sites rarely ever clean out their servers, even if they did, you can guarantee your information is already posted to another site. And you can be sure from there that somebody stored it on their computer and emailed it to a bunch of their friends and co-workers; a vicious cycle. Suddenly your embarrassing photo or online rant about something has made you the laughing stock of your community and future employers will hold this over your head. Employers now often do a quick Google search of their applicant’s names, to see if they have a social networking site account. Colleges do this also; they want to make sure they are hiring some complete slacker who has all sorts of incriminating stuff on his page.
Whether this information is collected or used against you is completely involuntary too. It is one thing to share a picture because they put it there. It is another thing to involve someone in a video or picture without their consent, or post personal things about them like address or telephone number.
Governments and third party advertising organizations pretty much have an absolute ruling over these kinds of data. A government can use and access anybody’s data for pretty much any excuse they have, and do so often. Although almost all of the time it is to catch or a crook or bad guy, this is still a little disturbing. We really need to step up privacy laws in the U.S. and also around the world. People in some less than democratic countries have the worst times with this kind of stuff: government censorship, Internet police, and other ridiculous practices.
If the laws won’t change, (and they usually don’t for a long, long, time) then something has got to help our situation out. For one, try using an anonymous proxy. Also, encryption services will encrypt all of your data so that no one would be able to hack in and steal any sensitive information. Take your privacy into your own hands, (the legal way) get an anonymous proxy now.
