Published: July 11, 2008 10:19 am            

Privacy just isn't what it used to be

Someone is watching you. It could be the security cameras watching to make sure you don’t try to take the five-fingered discount on a piece of jewelry or the cookies logged on your computer that offer a history of the sites you’ve been on. Security cameras have been around for some time now. We’re used to them, and even the idea of cameras in traffic lights to catch us if we try to run a red light. Society is on camera a lot.

Cameras watching the population seems to be the wave of the future. Google can also access what you’ve been searching for on their search engine. They collect information about the sites its users visit, including Internet Provider addresses, time and date, search terms, and they keep this information for an indefinite amount of time. Information on this can be found at www.google-watch.org. It’s kind of scary knowing that someone at Google can access when and where I tried to look up ways to wash vinyl siding or maybe ways to lose weight. I don’t want them to know everthing about me.

One of the wonderful things about the 21st century is all the information that’s available to us through the Internet. There’s music, video and data for almost any interest. These things come with a cost, however. The people who put the information and sites together want to know who’s looking at them. Google wants to know what you’re searching for so they can help you search better in the future.

It sounds like a nice idea, but it’s also too close to Big Brother for me. Big Brother is of course the faceless entity who watches over everyone in George Orwell’s classic novel “1984.” People in their apartments are watched at all times in the novel by telescreens and picked up by the government if they break the rules. If Google is watching what we search for, then some searches might arouse suspicion. Although looking up “ways to use anti-freeze” should be cause for alarm anyway, it’s kind of scary that Google knows what we’re looking for on the Internet. They may not know why.

If you use the Internet, know that your privacy is gone. Privacy is a thing of the past to a degree anyway, with the cameras and the data collection done to find out our shopping habits. Amazon watches what you buy and then makes recommendations based on that, which is fine if it’s a purchase for me. If it’s a Christmas gift I’ve bought for someone, then recommending a romance novel or a Sponge Bob Squarepants movie isn’t going to make me want to click ‘Buy now.’ It messes with their data collecting and what they recommend.

The Internet isn’t the only way our privacy is going the way of the 8-track, and both aren’t coming back. Slowly, our rights and privileges are being stripped. I’m not a smoker, nor do I want to smell smoke, but a recent ban on smoking in bars in Fayette County caught my eye. First, you can’t smoke in places such as bars now in Fayette County. Next, will they ban drinking alcohol in bars? It seems like a slippery slope to be on when these privileges are taken.

Cases such as this seem trivial until it’s something that affects you. Then it becomes a big deal. Not that I want people smoking in my face, but if the owner of a business wants to cater to that crowd, then fine. I can take my business elsewhere. It’s frightening when the government can dictate what you can do and where. It could lead to the government mandating what we can eat and how many times a week we can eat out. We do have an obesity problem in the country, after all. How helpful to us all would it be if the government came up with guidelines to lead us in a healthier direction?

As an adult, I like to think I can take care of myself. I don’t need the government watching over everything I do. I don’t need Amazon recommending what I might want to buy either because it’s usually wrong. And I don’t care for Google keeping track of whatever I’m looking for on the Internet.

More and more it seems that Big Brother is watching us and that’s not a pleasant thought.

        

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