Reading Activity #5

Reading and Activity #5

Monday, November 19^th, 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.