Adieu To Privacy

[vivek2012 0]

ADIEU TO PRIVACY

We are living in an age in which the technological advancement has almost reached its peaks. But along with the joy and happiness it has brought through this advancement, it also contributed to a very noticeable change in the private lives of human beings.

The ‘peephole’ technologies, that have been developed side by side with the other technological advancements, has been posing a threat to the “Privacy” of human beings, which was guarded with utmost care by the human race till the advent of this technological boom, as it is widely known as.

In fact it is Internet which should take a major share of the blame for it. Through Facebook, Blogs, emails et al, the human race is going public by revealing the most intimate part of their lives. Add to that the mobile telephone bloom - it has almost created havoc in the private lives of a major percentage of the total human race. To peep into the private lives of the hapless and vulnerable, with or without their knowledge, click a picture or MMS clip and thereafter send it to other people at will and create havoc in the lives of the affected persons has been made easily possible by invention of Mobile Telephones.

Then comes the reality shows. There are umpteen numbers of so called “Reality Shows’ are aired through TV channels, which focuses on the private lives of people and make it as much public as possible.

Further, the cyber-inspecting agencies does their bit to invade into the private lives of their respective citizens by monitoring emails, telephonic conversations etc. Of course, there are good reasons making such checking mandatory from the security point of view of a nation, but nonetheless it also is a form of peeping into the privacy of a human being.

There may be a number of other areas, through which the privacy of human beings are compromised/invaded, which I may have not touched upon due to my limited knowledge in the subject matter. However, from what I have gathered, it becomes very clear to me that the day is not far when we would be biding adieu forever to one of the pillars of our society - the PRIVACY.

[sheepdog 10]

You are SO right on! This is one subject I find really frightening. Have you seen any of the Google earth satalite pictures? Let me tell you, it's not even safe to sunbath naked in your own back yard anymore!

[k_nitin_r 8]

The concern over privacy is hard to understand considering that people volunteer their information over social networking websites and other websites that collect personal information. People want to be the voice of their opinions yet they condemn the practice of collecting personal information - if they did not want to have their names, email addresses, and any other information about themselves available online, they should have thought it through before handing it over to the websites that collect the information.There are some people who are paranoid, or should I say careful, enough to not put any information about themselves online. There are others who use pseudonyms that they stick to online. However, people who know them may put up information about them so even for the people who know how to cover their tracks, there's the risk of somebody else putting up their information, such as photographs of them on FaceBook or Flickr, mentions about them in a blog post along with an email address or other contact information, or perhaps even a photograph of something that can be used to get a home address (for example, a license plate number on a vehicle). It is therefore right to say that the Internet has been one way to put privacy behind the right to information.(Note: I edited my post to get rid of the HTML tags that the post editor surprisingly added into my message)

Edited April 6, 2012 by k_nitin_r (see edit history)

[sheepdog 10]

I am constantly amazed at the stupid things people "share" on social media outlets. I find it hard to believe that people give out all the information that they do, and then there are those pictures........gads, what are people thinking? Have they no shame at all? Don't they realize that this sort of thing can very well come back and bite them in the butt? Sure, your just a horny teenager now, but some day you are going to grow up and maybe want to become some one important, and can you imagine the hay day the press would have with a presidential candidate's naked teenager pictures? While I can't feel too sorry for those stupid enough to give away their personal information, there are far to many cases where people are tricked into giving it, or it is just flat stolen from them threw no fault of their own. There are just too many ways for people to steal this information.

[k_nitin_r 8]

People have their information stolen on the Internet and that constitutes a loss of privacy too. Some people are careful enough to not put up anything publicly accessible on the Internet. However, they should be careful enough to protect their authentication credentials for any private information about themselves that is stored on the Internet too. For example, consider the case of a typical user with a GMail account containing messages from his or her bank containing a bank account number, and a password recovery email for online banking. A scammer can create a page that looks almost identical to the GMail login page and can collect the username and password of the unsuspecting user. To cover the tracks further, the scammer can even get the user's web browser to redirect to the actual GMail website after having collected the username and password, further making it difficult for the user to tell that his or her information has been stolen until it is too late. The user does find out much later after the bank account has missing funds and it is traced much much later after the incident has occurred and the bank refuses any responsibility over the incident because it was reported to the bank by the user long after the incident occurred.Banking information only affects a user financially (though there is the emotional effect that results from the financial loss), but when confidential emails and photographs reach somebody who decides to misuse the information, much more can be lost.People have to be careful with the way they handle personal information about themselves. When they access private information on the Internet, they have to make sure that the website they are entering their authentication credentials onto is actually the website that they think it is - a look at the URL in the address bar of the web browser will reveal if it really is the actual website. Using the HTTPS protocol for login rather than the HTTP protocol is another means of ensuring that the information being sent cannot be stolen easily. The authentication information is typically encrypted by most large websites such as GMail, Yahoo! Mail, eBay, Paypal, and other such websites. Some websites that do not use HTTPS encryption should be avoided when accessing information from a public or wireless network.Another means of ensuring that you are entering the information on a trusted website is to use a two-factor or out-of-band authentication. Yahoo! Mail enables you to create a privacy seal such that when you do attempt to log in, an image of your choosing appears to indicate that the web page you are accessing does actually come from Yahoo!, though there is no guarantee that the web page has not been altered in any way. It does provide some degree of protection. Often, banking websites provide you with a password as well as a device that changes a time-sensitive pass code to enter when you have to be authenticated. Other websites would probably send you an SMS message with a confirmation code to ensure that you are the one who has initiated a particular transaction. It provides an additional layer of security because a scammer trying to use your account has to know more than just your password to gain access to your account and misuse your information.Passwords and other means of accessing private information should be changed frequently or at regular intervals. Passwords should not be easily guessable, such as using one's own first name or date of birth. Passwords should ideally consist of alphabets, numbers, and even some symbols. Passwords should not be written down, but if they are, they should be stored in a safe place and not in proximity to the computer.Photographs posted on the Internet often remain for a long long time. Perhaps a presidential candidate a few decades in the future would have his or her photographs as a kid accessible on the Internet, along with photographs of his or her room. Something as simple as a picture taken in a messy room can be detrimental to one's career because it can convey the message that one is disorganized and erratic in his or her work behavior. Employers today often request employees for their social media passwords, which FaceBook has stated is a violation of its policies, but that does not stop employers from gaining access to information posted online by either getting employees' passwords or getting them to provide access to an application that gathers information from their accounts. The FaceBook API comes with an agreement that employers would be in violation of if they store the information collected from employees' FaceBook profile accounts, however it is hard for FaceBook to tell when the information has been copied so it is up to the users to act as the guardians of the information and ensure that the information they have posted to social media websites does not fall into the wrong hands.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I think the lack of privacy has always been here, it just wasn't as widely publicized as it is now. They've had the technology to do it for a while, so I don't see why people think they haven't been doing it. Just because it's becoming a media-spread event doesn't make it new. It's like people who feel that kidnappings/murders didn't happen 50-60 years ago. I'm sure they did, they just weren't all over the media since it wasn't like it is today. Now something can happen and it can be on TV, live, within a few minutes all over the world.