Reading
and Activity #5
Monday,
November 19th, 2012
The word “privacy” correlates to the word:
“freedom”. Privacy directly corresponds to freedom because, to me, it is the
knowledge that your basic human right to individuality is safe and free of
judgment. Privacy is very much an issue to
me and of the world. It is a concern because as we advance technology, we also
advance the ability to turn our actions into recordable data. As our every
action gets permanently recorded our sense of safety and individuality is stripped.
The article, “Facebook & your privacy” states a good point; ““Facebook has
purposefully worked to erode the concept of privacy by disingenuously claiming
users want to share all of their personal information.” It has convinced the
government, lawmakers, and corporations that users purposely share personal information because users want to be found.
This leads to the assumption that “making” money is more important and that the
sense of privacy is not valued. I am in no way discouraging Facebook or the
notion that data collection is a bad thing. In fact, research is great!
Research fuels our minds and finds truths/patterns that are useful in
understanding the world. However, when does data collection turn people into
objects? Where is the line for collecting
information or stealing it?
The point that I am making is that privacy is
rooted in our sense of freedom and security. A bigger picture than Facebook
monitoring/recording clicks and views is that our world is being churned into a
faceless mass. A mass that is recognized to simply pump out numbers and a mass
that feels unsafe. When the sense of individuality is removed, fear is
triggered. Society then is made up of unstable, paranoid individuals that instinctively
turn to whatever that will make them
feel safe again. When a society is unable to think critically, they become
accessible and gullible…and that’s how the world will end.
That might have been a little dramatic, but
seriously consider how the Mao-Communist government was able to brainwash it’s
citizens into unspeakable atrocities. China is the world’s largest country with
millions and millions of individuals, yet it only took one government to
convince them that the slaughtering of the intellectuals and middle class was
the way to make China successful. It was because after years of fathom and
instability, the Chinese people were desperate for someone to make them feel
safe.
Physically locking up people may not essentially
take their sense of freedom away. However, strip away their feel of security
and individualism and effectively you will have robbed them of freedom.
