This is a pretty exciting age and there are a number of reasons for that. The population's perceptions have shifted. What were once considered inacceptable practices and behaviours have suddenly become the norm. We see a lot of different examples of that. Most of the example are good: the racial equality is now higher than ever, and the same applies to equality towards women in work places.
Internal factors such as technological advancements played a big role in these developments. The power of centralized electronic archives and the world wide web made our lives easier. In the past you had to manually search for a paper document if you were looking for information. Now the desired information is two clicks away (sometimes even one). Another advantage is that back up systems are made and stored in different locations, which means that fires no longer threaten the existence of information.
Unfortunately there is another side to this coin. These depositories of information might be hacked from distance. It makes our personal information vulnerable to rogue attacks. No matter how secure the system is, there will always be a smart hacker. It's scary, but it doesn't mean we should revert back to stone age, because there are many examples of how technology can help regular people access large databases. Let's take
telephone number lookup as an example.
This service allows you to get details about the person to whom a particular telephone number belongs. It has a lot of useful applications in our everyday lives. If a person is being bombarded with phone calls from a particular telemarketing company he can reverse lookup their number and send an official letter to their address. You can also discover who is that annoying individual who is placing silent phone calls.
But even this seemingly innocent tool is a potential weapon. A sexual predator also knows how to use reverse lookups. A careless person might give out his or her phone number in the club and become a victim. This might force us to sacrifice our conveniences for the sake of safety. We have to remain vigilent at all times, when it comes to disclosing our personal information to strangers.
Every single individual should be able to express his opinion. We as people should be the ones dictating what can and cannot be disclosed Our expressions of freedom are like small grains which are easy to lose but hard to get back. Our children might one day find themselves in a complete privacy nightmare. If ever that level of privacy violation is reached it would be extremely hard to change anything. I see only one possible solution which can help us avoid this nightmare. I believe that privacy matters should be voted on by every citizen.
More Information:
Categories
