QotW6: Have We Actually Lost Our "Right to Privacy"?

Hewlett Packard’s executives pretexting to obtain its board member’s private phone records and hiring private investigators to spy on its employees and managers in 2005 have raised a major concern in society today, “privacy”, our right to be left alone (Sullivan, 2006). Everyday, we trade our privacy for a benefit we receive in a service like handing over our name, address, and telephone number for a car prize in real life or our email account to set up our blog in the virtual community. Nevertheless, with the emergence of the Internet and personal digital gadget today like camera phone and digital camera, privacy loss has become a major threat as we may not know when we have surrendered our own privacy. Have we actually lost our right privacy nowadays?

In fact, according to Sullivan (2006), it is so simple to lose our privacy in this era of “sousveillance” – “watching from below” where ordinary citizen has become the watcher besides the surveillance of “Big Brothers”, our government or big corporations (Wikipedia, 2007). In another words, Rosen (2004) highlighted that we are actually living in the world of “Omnipticon” where people start to scrutinize each other although nobody knows who is observing or being observed at any particular moment.

What is about privacy online since we can remain anonymous? Indeed, as we move into the virtual world, the loss of privacy has become even higher due to the ease in the invasion of online piracy. For example, people may not realize that once they launch the Internet Explorer, not only their personal information but also their online activities are recorded immediately by someone on the server, which is seen the example on i312 Information in Cyberspace how a person’s IP address and web browsers can be tracked down from the web. Have we lost in this trade off between our privacy and benefits from the services in the virtual world or have we underestimated the level of our privacy as Rosen (2004) has noted in his article, “The Naked Crowd”, Americans today focuses so much in creating their identity through self revelation or revealing details of their personal lives in the public that they have actually forgotten their own privacy beginning to reach their end.

Though the loss of privacy online may seem to be inevitable, we actually can minimize it through determining how much personal information we should reveal to the public. A great illustration for online privacy negotiation can be seen in the typical example of my participation in a Vietnamese food recipe forum (http://www.amthuc.com/). To gain access to the food recipe database and exchange information with other people in the forum on this site, I have used my free yahoo account and create a pseudonym (labellena) to set up my account there. Moreover, I also tried not to reveal my personal information on the web by disclosing only my gender and occupation on the web since all of my activity here are recorded automatically and available for other members’ view in my personal profile like the date and time when I first joined the community, the total number of pages that I have viewed on the web, my total posts in the discussion about Vietnamese restaurants, my favorite recipes online, and finally the total points that I have earned on the web. To maintain my identity, I use a comic character for my signature in my posts. In addition in preserving my privacy, I exchange messages with other members through the online message box located on the web. Besides, I only reveal my identity in reciprocity to members who have sent information about their real identity to exchange contacts in real life and who are my school mates in Vietnam.

In my opinion, although we seem to lose certain aspect in protecting our privacy in this era of digital technology, we have not lost our right to privacy. Indeed, we can still preserve our privacy online by determining how much exposure of our lives we want in the virtual community. More importantly, we should try to utilize best the advantages of the digital technologies offline positively to contribute and coordinate our efforts in making this world a better place.

Reference

Rosen, J. (2004, July 19). The naked crowd: America’s culture of self-revelation spells the end of piracy and the promotion of a smothering conformity. Retrieved 21:00, March 8, 2007 from http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA5FF.htm

Sullivan, B. (2006, October 17). Privay lost: does any body care? It’s vanishing, but there is no consensus on what it is or what should be done. Retrieved 18:00, March 8, 2007 from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221095/print/1/displaymode/1098/

Wikipedia (2007). Sousveillance. Retrieved 10:00, March 9, 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

http://www.amthuc.com


Images

Korean Progressive Network 'Jinbonet'. (2003). Right to Privacy. Retrieved 21:00, March 9, 2007 from http://rights.jinbo.net/english/privacy.html

Consumeraffairs. (2007). Retrieved 21:30, March 9, 2007 from http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/images/privacy.jpg