Loss of Privacy: Should We Chalk It Up to the Information Age?
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September 11 was no "tipping point" for acceleration in the loss of privacy. That's the conclusion to be drawn from responses to this month's column. Rather the loss of privacy is a natural product of the information age and has been under way for some time. As Michael Gorman observed, "Chat rooms and corporate message boards have had a much more profound change on the privacy of business organizations than the tragic events of 9/11."
There is almost a tone of resignation in the responses. For example, Robin Chacko suggests that "We chose the information age and with it comes a price: privacy. If monitoring is a good way to provide security, so be it."
Another line of thought suggests that the questions concerning trends in the loss of privacy may be somewhat irrelevant anyway. Rick Kennedy asserted, for example, that "'Privacy' and, for that matter, 'security' are and have always been illusions... 9/11 did (however) provide a 'tipping point' for a greater awareness of what the concept of privacy entails, like Plato's prisoners discovering that they had been observing and talking about shadows as opposed to the objects themselves."
The tone of these responses raises several questions. Have we become so accustomed, however gradually, to the idea of oversight that surveillance in the name of transparency is a mere increment in a long-established trend? Is this in part a function of the reminders of the benefits of transparency and oversight in the wake of the collapse of an Enron? And has this state of affairs opened the doors a bit wider for the implementation of systems designed to enable our behaviors as consumers to be tracked even more fully? What do you think?