The Final & Last Reading...& It's Number is 5 :)

The End of Privacy

The End of Privacy, written by Daniel J. Solove, is an article describing the advantages and disadvantages of our ever-changing, technologically advanced world. Many different elements are considered when discussing the subject of privacy. 

The 15 year-old “Star Wars Kid” experienced deleterious social and psychological effects after a video he made of himself was stolen and leaked out onto YouTube.  In 2007, Facebook members were outraged when their personal purchases were made public on their newsfeeds, for everyone to see.  Privacy loss is not within a person’s control anymore. Internet service providers collect information about the websites you surf, cable stations keep a tab on the shows your may be watching, and whenever a purchase is made online, your personal data becomes less and less secure. So what do we do?

As some legal scholars say there is no hope, nothing we can do.  However, in my opinion, privacy can be protected to an extent. High school, college students, and adults, could refrain from sharing so many personal details about themselves via their social networking sites. People should make a conscious effort to keep their firewalls and Internet security updated on their computers, and limit using credit cards over the Internet.

However, those suggestions cover the aspects of privacy under our control. It is unfortunate that for the rest of our lives, those of us a part of the “Google Age” will forever leave behind digitized trails of our pasts that can never be erased.  I particularly liked that Solove used John Dewey’s quote, "a person is not something complete, perfect, [or] finished," but is "something moving, changing, discrete, and above all initiating instead of final." The elders in my generation have for the most part been forgiven for their recklessness and bad decisions, because their misdeeds have long been forgotten or erased from the memories of others. In my generation, we will not be able to just transform our reputations with such ease. We will forever have digitally archived reminders of the past.

Scary.