Help please

Privacy is one of the most important values that anyone can have. Yet, not many of us realize this. Being Surveillance does not seem to be an issue now a days. But the question is should it be? Cameras can be seen all over towns and cities making it seem normal. What we do not realize is that someone is keeping track of our every step. Many people do not even care that they are been surveillance, saying that they fell much safer walking the streets at night knowing that some is watching if something goes wrong. I personally do agree with them because I feel the same way about this situation. But the type of surveillance that I am really concern about is social networking sites like Facebook. Yes, we can be surveillance trough Facebook. There are over 58 million active users today and this number keeps growing, making our information accessible to the world. I never realize how easy it was for people to search for my profile. Facebook users love posting their information, feeling that their friends are the only ones seeing. In fact, thousands have accesses to this information. Also, the pictures that we post become the property of Facebook. We can limit our information but not many of us know that we have the choice to do this. With all this in mind, our generation and the future generation are going to get use to the fact that it is ok to share our information. Our sense of security and privacy has been twisted by Facebook. What I don’t understand is why we are not doing anything about these issues. The government should get involve into this matter because of the reason that we do not understand what privacy is. Also, institutions should not be allowed to look up our profiles.

Many facebook users have a different thought on what privacy is. The reason is that we are used to the fact that been watch is okay. We love the attention that we get when posting our messages on Facebook. Danah Boyd, anthropologist and social-networking expert said “Information in not private because no one knows it; it is private because knowing is limited and controlled." I do not agree with this statement. Some of our information should be private, but because of Facebook, private information just seems like any other information being posted. Most of us do not know how to limit ourselves, why should we, when everyone else is giving out their information. When posting our information many of us feels that our information is going to stay on Facebook and be seen by only our friends. In fact, this is not so, our friends are the same ones that go out spreading our information when they fine something interesting to talk about. So how is limiting who knows going to control what we think is private? There are facebook users that post there schedule, locations, and even their relationship status. This is a very serious matter and very dangerous. This kind of danger should be brought to people’s attention. The government involvement will help us understand what is happening with our privacy. They should work on our security and have Facebook post detail on what is going to happen when we join. These details should be shot and straight to the point.

In addition to not understanding privacy many employers, governments, and administrators are having easy access to our information without our knowledge. This is not a good thing because we can get in trouble just by giving out some simple opinions. We want to say what is in our mind without the fear of being watched. What happen to our freedom of speech? This is slowly taking over our life without us realizing it. Employers check Facebook vet job applicants, for example, and some have advised users to change their profile or photos during an application process, as the Stanford daily reported last year. What we talk to with our friends should be no one else business. Facebook users should be notified if someone else outside their friends list is viewing their profile. Not only that but it should also make it impossible for outsiders to get accesses to our profile. The government involvement will help in enforcing these rules. They should also pressure employers to have us sign a disclosure form if they would like to know anything about us.

Even more important than working with the intuition it will also finally take action on a movement on privacy policy. This is a good step as it seems that our generation is not going to step up on this issue. At the beginning of Facebook’s controversy there where about 700,000 web savvy who organized an online protest. Yet today, the activism has waned. There has been other protest but they have all subsided. This is because we easily believe the excuses that Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, has to say. Also, our generation just seems to be getting use to the fact that others should do our work. The government involvement will take us one step closer in resolving this issue.

If we let our privacy policies evolve to the step it is taking right now, we will surely change our minds on what privacy really is. This change will cause us to release more information. It will also be easier for a stalker to follow our every step, endangering the life of many. Most people think that this is a form of socialism but be assure that it is not. The government has the right to protect the people and what they a basically doing.