The Fallacy of Privacy

The use of modern day technological advances such as the internet and social media has created access to people's private lives that are unprecedented in history. Privacy issues affect social, legal, and moral fronts in our lives every day. I feel that since the age of the internet and other social sites, we have left ourselves open for our privacy to be intruded on. While only a tiny fraction of Americans - 7 percent, according to a recent survey by The Ponemon Institute - change any behaviors in an effort to preserve their privacy.

"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Was the famous comment that Scott McNealy said about privacy in the digital age on January 25, 1999. However the question remains, do we have any privacy or is it like Bernoff and Li say in Groundswell that "removing something from the internet once something is online it is like trying to remove pee from a pool" Do we only have zero privacy if we do not value the privacy we do have? Many people responded negatively when Scott McNealy uttered his famous words, but are they true?

The famous comment that Scott McNealy uttered in 1999 immediately drew angry comments from the privacy advocate sector. Some claimed that they were astonished at his claims and still others called him irresponsible for his comment, yet, no one said he was wrong. Om Malik argued in 2006 that Scott McNealy was right; "Search engines are like the digital sand, where we leave foot prints. Corporate email systems (as Microsoft and Bill Gates know all too well from their DoJ adventures), instant messaging systems, and even shopping carts - we are leaving a tiny bit of privacy wherever we go." Which seems to be the norm, as accused murders and the like are tracked by their web browsing amongst other things. Even though with all of that, do we have privacy? I have researched this and to be quite honest, I have found that every time we open a web browser, our online privacy takes a beating.

What bigger threat to our online privacy in the 21st Century than social media outlets. Facebook, Twitter among others are a plethora of information not only to hackers but Federal police as well. Recent reports show federal police are gaining real-time access to social media network accounts in America without obtaining search warrants, reported CNET. This includes popular networking websites such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

According to statistics from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the U.S. Department of Justice's live access to social media sites and e-mail providers has jumped by 80 percent from 2010 to 2011. All of this being done without first obtaining search warrents. Not only do they keep track of how you communicate with someone via social media sites but also who you communicate with.

Documents that have been released by the ACLU say that the police are using a law from 1986 that tells them what numbers were dialed enabling the more invasive surveillance. This allows them to monitor such social media websites such as Facebook and Google+ to see who the users are in contact with and also which internet web addresses are visited.

With all these documents being released, the ACLU is hoping that it will push Congress to implement stronger and stricter requirements for police access to non-content data. According to ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump, the government is allowed to use any of the surveillance tools they have with little to no regard of safeguarding American's privacy.

However not everyone is just lying around waiting for the government to come knocking on their doors to arrest you for one thing or another and efforts are being undertaken to address the privacy issue. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) proposed a bill that would force authorities to get warrents before accessing our e-mail or social media or even tracking our cell phones. However senetors delayed a vote for a similar bill not long ago when law enforcement groups protested.

As an online student, we may be worried about our academic privacy, but in reality we are entitled to a certain measure of privacy. FERPA, or Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, is a federal law that does protect the privacy of our school records, including but not limited to our addresses and educational records. All schools that receive some form of federal funding are bound by this law and cannot give out any identifiable information from the education records to anyone without first receiving written permission from you.

Our education records that are kept by our educational institution contains things such as our report cards, transcripts, contact information or family information in addition to our class schedules both what we may be taking now and our future classes. Once we reach the age of 18 or are legally considered an emancipated minor, under FERPA all the rights that our parents have go over to us. We become what the educational system calls an "eligible student". We have the right to control who sees our information and rights to file complaints with the Department of Education.

Even though our academic information is fairly safe, our personal information is not. As a student we could have our classroom tab open along with Facebook or Twitter and Yahoo or Gmail and World of Wasrcraft (WOW) or Second Life (SL). Although most of these are free with the exception of WOW, they want to know your information and what you do online; we call that data mining. All these web sites combine breadcrumbs and what we tell them about ourselves willingly from what we search for on Google, how we pay for things on sites such as Amazon and WOW, but not limited to who our followers are or our friends on Facebook and Twitter. Surprisingly these various websites can put together very detailed profiles of our social and economical information.

Certain privacy precautions are common sense, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great list of the top 12 ways to protect online privacy.

1. Know your browser and computer settings to avoid revealing personal information inadvertently.

2. Turn on cookie notices in your Web browser, and/or use cookie management software (also known as infomediaries). A cookie is a very small text file which is set to share information between your browser and the Web service you are trying