Privacy

This post is a respond to Justin’s blog about stalking people. I totally agree that lots of people, including myself had taken privacy for granted. Due to the advances of technology, now we have sophisticated cell phones with built-in camera. For stalkers, there are lots of opportunity to stalk or to watch people from afar and discrete. In Justin’s blog, look how easy it is to take a picture without anyone noticing, Justin wasn’t using a silencer for the phone because all the students were packing and ready to leave.

From this point, he had shown how vulnerable we are when it comes to privacy. Another example from the internet is the global social network like Facebook, or Myspace. But I’ll discuss more of the example from Facebook since I don’t use Myspace. In Facebook, there are lots of students who post their crucial information such as cell phone numbers, home address, and other private data. Global network is a land mind that could strike one of its users. Furthermore, just as Colleen had said from class discussions about Facebook, it is true that we don’t have boundaries when it comes to internet privacy. From her example, when she registered into Facebook, she doesn’t have any friends in there, but soon, there were lots of people wanted to befriend her, including Bill Gates. Now we know for sure that he is not the “real” Bill Gates, but why does most of us do accept strangers’ friend invitation in Facebook? Does our mind subconsciously translate lots of friends into coolness? This is something that we need to trace back and think.

Furthermore, the costs and consequences of today’s technology-life coexist as I have mentioned on my Connectivity post. But because of the convenience of today’s technology, people have become blinded by the fact that the cost is our privacy. Think about the camera in convenient store, ATM’s machine, traffic light, and Satellite. It is true that all of these are designed for our safety purposes. But when we look and analyze deeper, some computer genius might misused it for other purposes.

Concluding for this response, how do we protect ourselves from stalkers when technology knows no boundaries? Well, I think we can come up with some level of cautiousness in terms of privacy. For example, don’t let your private information leaked out loud on the internet, because some people do like the attention. Because why bother to post in on Facebook if the people in your network could just ask you directly? Technically, they are your friends. Hopefully, this post conveys the message of how important privacy is.