Desperately seeking privacy
Posted by Sandra Cosser on 15 Sep 2007 at 06:41 pm | Tagged as: Social Media
I came across a rather disturbing concept this morning. I’m not the most up-to-date person when it comes to technological moving and shaking so please forgive me if this is old news to everyone else. I am making an effort to improve my archaic brain. It is the concept of people search engines.
It is pointed out that the concept of people search is not new, that we have been using the telephone directories and public records for yonks. I disagree, this concept is entirely new. Only your surname, address and telephone number are available in a telephone directory and they are entirely optional, if you don’t want to be listed you don’t have to be. What they are talking about in the people search is combining all information about you that is available online, from any source and jamming it into one resource so that anyone in the world with a yen to look up your name can find it.
They argue that you put that kind of information into social media systems like Facebook anyway and if you don’t want that information made public then you should have read the small print. Fair enough, we should have read the small. I don’t know anyone who read the small print but fine. My primary point, however, is that we put that information out there so that our friends could see it, and if we made new friends then they could see it too. We did not put it out there so that some arbitrary stranger from half way across the globe could find it while trawling through a people search one sleepless night. It just seems to me as if that kind of thing is asking for stalker trouble.
We shake our heads and pity celebrities whose lives are totally devoid of privacy, whose moves are tracked and who can’t even take out the garbage without it being plastered all over the front pages of tabloids globally. Our lives won’t make international headlines but our privacy will have vanished, our every move will be monitored by anyone who takes an interest. Is that really where we want to be headed all for the sake of convenience? Doesn’t anyone want to pick up a phone any more?
