I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and she was telling me how her little brother had learned to hack the school system to alter his grades at about 11 years old and had been hacking ever since. The stuff of movies? I think not!
Far more disturbingly, he had also shown her that just by gaining access to a friend's Facebook account he could track down that person's social security number and other personal information. YIKES! Don't worry, though. He didn't do anything with the information that time.
This anecdote serves to illustrate the extreme lack of privacy that has become the norm in the modern world and, obviously, has far-reaching implications. Information about individuals is collected constantly on a daily basis by other individuals (via facebook, etc) and by companies, especially advertisers, that are part of what Hull calls the "Panopticon." Living in a panopticon basically means being under constant or near-constant surveillance – surveillance that can be conducted must more easily by computers than by people. After all, what are computers if not an icon of the information age – an entity ideally composed of pure data and built or bred specifically to handle more and faster information each year.
One example of how privacy is, at least by conventional standards, routinely violated is when Google searches through a gmail user's mail in order to pull out keywords for advertising. This means that at the very least a computer, if not a person, is reading through millions of peoples' personal mail every day. It used to be a clearly defined federal offense to go rifling through someone's mail, but now it's just normal part of the program. Clearly, the world is changing. One must wonder whether we will have any privacy at all in the near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment