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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Collectively, we have all already lost more of our privacy than we care to recognize. Perhaps this will be disastrous, or perhaps we will simply emerge into a new society that will inarguably be forced to confront issues and topics we’d just as soon leave alone. Will the government be watching us all like big brother, or will it simply make all of our choices for us? Will companies continue to find newer and better ways to exploit our secrets for their pecuniary gain? Will we all carry smart phones to snap pictures of friends and complete strangers, and, using the same face-recognition technology that already auto-tags your friends, have entire dossiers of their personal information at our fingertips? | |
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< | As long as technology continues to advance, and people continue to subscribe to the “always connected” culture of Facebook, cell phones, GPS, wireless internet, AIM and G-Chat, privacy will continue to erode. This is the fundamental shift in society of our time, and there is no real way to keep it from happening. Throwing away your computer or deleting all your online accounts won’t change anything. What can, and should happen is the continued protection of rights we have always held dear. Freedom, autonomy and liberty will require new protections, and egregious infringements of rights should never be tolerated. The “Myspace Generation” that entered adolescence knowing nothing else is already here, and the trend towards greater openness and interconnectedness will continue. Where it takes us requires our utmost attention, but trying to stop or reverse it is like trying to stop the railroads and the settling of the West. Maybe it wasn’t always done correctly, and people’s rights were certainly violated along the way, but in the end it happened. | >
> | As long as technology continues to advance, and people continue to subscribe to the “always connected” culture of Facebook, cell phones, GPS, wireless internet, AIM and G-Chat, privacy will continue to erode. This is the fundamental shift in society of our time, and there is no real way to keep it from happening. Throwing away your computer or deleting all your online accounts won’t change anything. What I'm less sure of is the extent and reversibility of the impact our connected culture will have on the "ecology" of software development, and (sorry Eben) I don't know enough to say whether free and open source software is the elixir that could solve all our problems. But what can, and should happen is the continued protection of rights we have always held dear, and greater accountability of corporate players. Freedom, autonomy and liberty will require new protections, and egregious infringements of rights should never be tolerated. The “Myspace Generation” that entered adolescence knowing nothing else is already here, and the trend towards greater openness and interconnectedness will continue. Where it takes us requires our utmost attention, but trying to stop or reverse it is like trying to stop the railroads and the settling of the West. Maybe it wasn’t done correctly, a few powerful players got very rich, and people’s rights were certainly violated along the way, but in the end it happened. | | | We all have a deep intuitive sense of the normative value of privacy, but it will continue to be eroded in the pursuit of progress. Employers will utilize ever more invasive background checks, law-enforcement will take advantage of new resources for catching criminals and terrorists, and society will applaud the advances like it did with everything else that has made our lives “better,” or “improved our quality of life.” The only question now is, how much lost privacy will we tolerate, and how will we strike the balance in a new world of readily accessible intimate information? We simply can’t (and maybe shouldn’t) stop the erosion of privacy entirely, but we should most definitely care about it, and ensure it occurs on our terms, something most of us have not been doing when we point and click "agree," and grunt with satisfaction as our apps download and our personal liberties disappear. |
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