What information should one be required to divulge about one's self to others? Under what conditions? What information should one be able to keep strictly to one's self? When can details of one’s life be exposed to the world without saying that privacy is not a factor? These are a few among the questions that a concern for privacy raises. Today every person around the world are asking these issues. Privacy is something that is walking a fine line between existing and not existing because with technology continuously developing and growing this thing called privacy is slipping further and further away.
A case in point is the situation that occurred a few years ago in Florida. The Florida legislature believed that the state's building codes might be too stringent and that, as a result, the taxpayers were burdened by paying for buildings which were underutilized. Several studies were commissioned. In one study at the Tallahassee Community College, monitors were stationed at least one day a week in every bathroom.
Every 15 seconds, the monitor observed the usage of the toilets, mirrors, sinks and other facilities and recorded them on a form. This data was subsequently entered into a database for further analyses. Of course the students, faculty and staff complained bitterly, feeling that this was an invasion of their privacy and a violation of their rights. State officials responded, however that the study would provide valuable information for policy making. In effect, the State argues that the value of the information to the administrators was greater than any possible indignities suffered by the students and others. Soon the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined the fray. At their insistence the study was stopped, but only after the state got the information it wanted.
Most invasions of privacy are not this dramatic or this visible. Rather, they creep up on us slowly as, for example, when a group of diverse files relating to a person and his or her activities is integrated into a single large database. Collections of information reveal intimate details about a person and can thereby deprive the person of the opportunity to form certain professional and personal relationships. This is the ultimate cost of an invasion of privacy. So why do we integrate databases in the first place? It is because the bringing together of disparate data makes the development of new information relationships possible. These new relationships may be formed, however, without the affected parties' permission. You or I may have contributed information about ourselves freely to each of the separate databases, but that by itself does not amount to giving consent to someone to merge the data, especially if that merger might reveal something about us that we never intended to be shared. as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes in The Cancer Ward: “... Every person fills out quite a few forms in his life, and each form contains a countless number of questions. The answer of just one person to one question in one form is already a thread linking that person forever with the local center of the dossier department. Each thus radiates hundreds of such threads, which all together, run into the millions.” [1, p.221]
One could use preventive measures to help keep privacy alive by being proactive about the information they share online such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the pop ups that say you won a free iphone6 or iPad mini, etc. When using the internet make sure you clean your cookies and cache because those collect data about what websites you visit and the information you type in.
Privacy will always be issued when technology continues to move around the rules. The internet is a breeding ground for problems, and their internet should have a warning sign letting a user know that nothing shared is private.