We've given up entirely too much privacy in this country. What's so troubling is that we've done it so willingly. This needs to change.
All across the board, privacy, or the right to be left alone, is losing ground to transient concerns such as convenience and safety. We don't even notice what we're giving away.
To save money on milk, we'll give the grocery store our phone number, address and various other pieces of information. In order to talk with our friends in a common realm, we'll give MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdock, ridiculous amounts of information about ourselves. We'll post pictures of ourselves at parties, in bars and in compromising positions for anyone and everyone to see. Many college graduates have lost their new job because of their MySpace antics.
These examples are benign, but they've opened the door for the corrosive attitudes toward privacy. These attitudes allow the Bush administration's data mining operations, their eavesdropping operations euphemistically referred to as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and their secret prisons, including citizens deemed enemy combatants, to be detained in.
Americans are literally hemorrhaging their right to privacy. Nearly 60 percent of Americans are willing to carry an identification card with their personal biometric data on it - almost 20 percent (which is frightening) are willing to have a chip implanted under their skin that carries biometric and identification data, according to a survey conducted in October by www.msnbc.com.
When we give away privacy, we give away the hope of a second chance. Try running for Congress if you've purchased a controversial book off the Internet. Amazon can't give you recommendations if it isn't storing your purchase data. You can bet that sometime in your Congressional campaign, your purchase of "The Joy of Sex" is coming back to haunt you.
According to the Privacy Rights Clearing house, employers are already checking your credit score to determine if you are a quality candidate for employment, if you allow them to. College students have a horrendous track record for signing up for credit when they are 18 years old and damning themselves for years. Well, if you can't get a good job because of your credit score, digging yourself out is that much harder.
Why are we submitting to drug tests for employment? I used to work in a movie theater. I used to hang around people who smoked marijuana incessantly. There wasn't a time that I wouldn't have trusted those people to show up to work on time and sweep up popcorn. Yet, I was forced to make every new employee I hired at the movie theater submit to a drug test.
Great Britain, the nation with the dubious distinction of having the highest concentration of closed circuit television cameras, still suffers from terrorism. The subway bombings of 2005 happened in full view of these cameras. Great Britain has created the closest set of circumstances to an Orwellian society the world has ever seen, but to no avail. Five years after 9/11, terrorism hasn't stopped, but we're expected to give away privacy as if that is the silver bullet.
Giving away privacy rights does not keep us safe. The United Kingdom has showed us that. It's nice and convenient to have Amazon and other Web sites show me what I might like to purchase in the future based on my previous purchases, but that data may very well come back to haunt me. Simply put, we've given up our right to be left alone. We're no longer safe from intrusion, whether it be from business or government. For our sacrifice, we've received nothing substantial, and any perceived benefit is ephemeral.
It's time to demand a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing that we, as citizens, are safe from intrusion, whether it's from the government or from business. Snake oil peddlers promising cures and delivering nothing but lies have duped us, and done so with surprising effectiveness. The majority of us don't give privacy a second thought. We don't recognize when it's under attack. We're treading down the road of good intentions, and we desperately need to turn back.
-James Griffin is a philosophy senior.
-This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec. Send e-mail to letters@thedailyaztec.com. Anonymous letters will not be printed - include your full name, major and year in school.
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