Privacy

Privacy has always been an important issue and with the rise of the internet and social networking. Privacy has later gone on to become a topic of great controversy due to most people being easily exploited on the internet. Credit card details, home address and personal information are all put online nowadays, if that is to purchase shopping online or creating a social network account. All this information is now available online for anyone with computer knowledge to exploit. All this information you give away however is monitored as is your internet history. While some may argue that could be an invasion of your privacy to an extreme level, it’s difficult to deny that it is good that there are professionals out there who are monitoring people’s online history to help search out for people who aim to exploit others by hacking into their personal information and using it for their own gain without permission. As is stated "Any personal information can be sensitive information" (Acquisti, 2013)

Privacy as a whole has an overall ‘Big Brother’ vibe about it. The thought of everything you do is being watched by someone who is trying to keep you safe, with around 5.9 million CCTV camera's currently in operation in the UK. This in my opinion is a solid way of keeping an eye on people at all time but there is a certain voyeuristic feel about them, a sense that someone is keeping an eye out on you, and while I wouldn’t like it to reach George Orwell’s ‘1984’ depiction of privacy invasion, I do personally appreciate the fact that people do have an eye kept on them, but I do believe that sometimes security should understand that sometimes people would rather have some of their personal information kept private, “The only restrictions to what technology can do are ethical or legal, and in the absence of those it is crucial to understand people’s privacy concerns.”

In my opinion I do believe that today privacy is seen more as an optional approach compared to years prior, mainly due to the rise of Smartphone’s, the internet and social media. A lot of outlets today such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at least give people the option of giving their details themselves and gives options on how private your profile can be. A problem with this especially when it comes to Smartphone’s, much of your data will be uploaded to the cloud giving hackers free range of your photos and video’s if they were able to gain access to it; this same instance has been a constant problem over the years with celebrities getting their personal pictures released online.

Overall I do believe that is important for people to have an option with privacy, some may find the constant voyeurism may come as a turn off when it comes to creating accounts online and while in some aspects I can sympathize with those people but in my opinion I believe it is a necessity as you never know who actually can gain access to this data.

---

Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2014). How much do we care about our online privacy? . Available: http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/nov/10/online-privacy-digital-trust-psychology. Last accessed 9th May 2015.

  TED. (2013). Alessandro Acquisti: Why privacy matters . [Online Video]. 18 October. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_pqhMO3ZSY. [Accessed: 10 May 2015].



Image: http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/7640/laws-and-regulations/skype-apple-too-many-doubts-about-the-privacy.html