Most Americans used to go to great lengths to protect their privacy, and some of us still do. But even as they maintain unpublished numbers on their landlines and keep their names off their mailboxes, many folks nowadays willingly give up their precious privacy in other ways without even giving it a second thought.
Take a walk through the mall or most any other public place and you’ll see numerous people talking away on their cell phones, often at full volume. What’s more, the topics often discussed would have been carefully confined to a private one-on-one conversation just a few years ago. For example, while walking through Wal-Mart a few days ago I overheard a man telling the person on the other end of the line (as well as me and about 20 other bystanders) that he wouldn’t be coming to work the following day because he had to go to court to face a DUI charge. Like we all needed to know that.
But perhaps even worse than public cell phone conversations are the things that people are putting up on line about themselves these days. MySpace, Facebook and other social media sites make it all too easy for folks to put virtually their entire personal lives on display for anyone with an Internet connection to see. Some of the things that are posted online would surely make the poster’s mother blush (or worse), but either they don’t care or they don’t realize that in most cases whatever they put online is available for all to see – including mom if she has access to a computer or smartphone.
What most people apparently don’t realize is that unlike a cell phone conversation that is “gone” immediately after its conclusion, the things that go up on the web will most likely remain there from now on. A well publicized case in point: A 15 year old girl recently posted a rather suggestive photo of herself on her MySpace page, that she intended only for her “friends” to see. She mistakenly believed that since her profile was set to “Private” the photo would never be viewed by anyone else. But as you might expect, one of her “friends” copied the photo to his PC and emailed it to a bunch of his friends, a number of whom posted the photo on their pages – along with some rather rude commentary. By the time the girl in question found out about the breach, it was too late. The photo that had been intended only for a few close friends was by then being seen by thousands of people from all around the world.
The bottom line: Modern technology makes our lives better in many ways, but it also makes it far too easy to give up the very privacy that our ancestors fought so hard to preserve. And the most troubling thing about it is the fact that most youngsters haven’t a clue what they are so freely giving up, but it is almost certain to come back to haunt them some day.
I also have heard some very private conversations, at least they should have been…