Modern technology’s march on privacy
I’m sure many of you have heard about Google’s new Street View feature, where they give you a car’s view of any street in their selected pilot cities. This is great if you’re itching to find out what that storefront you’ll be searching for in rush hour traffic looks like, for example. The problem some people have with it is that to get this images, Google drove vans around said cities and photographed stuff. Including the people who were in said streets at the time (including people urinating or just leaving strip clubs, for example). Not to mention that people’s bedrooms and cars were visible, too.
This new technology is superimposed on a sort of rumbling increase in concerns of privacy as a result of the net in general. The younger generation (membership to which my years are slowly disqualifying me) post all kinds of personal information on sites like facebook and myspace. The old guard is sternly warning these kids to beware — potential employers, for example, may find your drunken picture on facebook and refuse to hire you.
This ubiquitous shedding of personal data about you — which is stored for eternity in the elephant-like memory of the Internet — is becoming a fact of life, whether one actively contributes to it or not. Google knows what you’ve been looking for on the Internet; your bank knows what you’ve been buying, and your car company knows where and how fast you’ve been travelling to. And the government, under legislation propelled by fear, has more and more access to this essentially private information.
While I would be among the first to worry about this trend and insist on limits on what information govermments and corporations can collect and store, and on how they use it, there’s a potential beneficial side effect of this increased transparency; namely, that we as a society become more tolerant of others. When we can all see each other’s warts, perhaps we will be less inclined to call each other on them. This article about Street View in Technology News is the first pseudo-mainstream source where I’ve heard this mentioned…
Perhaps I’m still a young, naive, idealist, but I still dream of living in a society where we can be who we want to be, and express our ideas, free of persecution. Is that really too much to ask for?
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