Doug’s Mouthpiece - Droug.co.uk

Is Privacy a Thing of the Past?

Is Privacy a Thing of the Past?

I’ll track you down…………………..

Personal privacy is definitely a thing of the past, no question about it and to some extent we are all masters of our own decline. But before we look at current attitudes towards privacy, we need to look back and complete a little history lesson.

In the ‘olden days’ people lived quite isolated lives, they knew people in their locality, they did not have phones, TV or internet connections. Even travel was difficult because people had to walk to where they wanted to go or save enough to catch a train.

Then with the arrival of the 20^th Century we all embrace technology and the conveniences it offered. Now we have entertainment at home, we can telephone anyone we want to and by the end of the Century, email throughout the world instantly!

Then more and more information became available on the internet. Now instead of having to think ‘I wonder what happened to Johnny Jones?’ and wondering how his life had shaped up, we can simply type Johnny Jones into Yahoo or Google and, while it may take some sifting through, we can actually find out what happened to the said Mr Jones. And if he and also has a site in Facebook or MySpace, we may be able to find out a lot about him (and he about you).

But there is a sense that many of the things that people write in Facebook or MySpace, Bebo etc will actually come back to haunt them. As recently as 2007, a survey of employers revealed that many look in social networking sites and assess the suitability of a candidate against their entries on the sites. So if you have entered your hobbies as decapitating worms or getting hideously drunk every night: beware, this may well come back to haunt you.

You may be able to change your Facebook entries, but what about entries that you have made with regard to other people’s entries, since you have little control over them, can they come back to haunt you?

People seem to have embraced the technological advances of the internet and ‘ease of communication’ without thinking about the implications. Before if we wanted to track someone down, a private detective had to be hired, or at least some really hard work, on our part, to find them. Now it can be done in three clicks of a mouse (sometimes more sometimes less).

Add in to this scenario the fact that the UK now has more surveillance cameras than any other country, along with powers that have been vested in local authorities as part of the ‘war on terror’ and you can see that we no longer have any privacy and many people who felt that they wanted to share their intimate details with the world when they were 20, may live to regret it when they are 40, trying for senior management posts and have children to consider. Yes, privacy may no longer be around, but we really have to accept much of the responsibility for this situation ourselves.

Doug will run off and hide:)

Politics written by Doug Scott