Sshhh ... it's a secret! Do not tell anyone. This is extremely private. It's vital that it stays between the two of us. Yeah, right! Us two and 200 million others. In today's world we have status updates, tweets, YouTube videos, corrupt media hacking - and you want to try to keep a secret?
Well, you naive, misled fool - good luck! Privacy is virtually non-existent in James McTeigue's film V for Vendetta, where a corrupt government makes sure it knows everything about everyone 24/7. It's the ultimate form of control and it's all digital. For instance, the government uses surveillance phone-tapping to track conversations. God forbid anyone has any sort of conversation without it being monitored (I keep secrets from my Mum. Scary!). You might think this film is just fiction, but it truly is becoming reality.
There is evidence that Rupert Murdoch's News of the World was using private detectives to break into the voicemail of people of "interest" and to eavesdrop on private conversations. Apparently, they managed to hack into around 4000 phones, just to get a "good" story.
Privacy is not just a privilege.
It is our right. We rely on it, but maybe we take it for granted.
Technology is a force to be reckoned with in our daily lives.
Maybe we haven't yet fully realised that social networking sites such as Facebook are single-handedly destroying the boundary between private and public.
Facebook has more than 500 million users and just over 2 million of these are New Zealanders. Sixty million status updates are posted each day.
That means 60 million useless, mindless, mostly inappropriate comments on private lives, 60 million posts that are so important that the whole planet has to see.
But who cares?
So what if you got wasted last night. I do not care how cute your baby is and I most definitely do not want to know that you have just eaten a muffin with your latte. This is just stuff, daily silliness, and you are letting your addiction to "likes" and "pokes" destroy your better judgement.
But it's not just about what you yourself put on. How about those embarrassing photos your so-called friends tagged you in?
Yes, that's right, the one where you are picking your nose in the background. Or that snapshot of you flashing the camera open to all your friends, their friends, mutual friends and people you do not even know exist?
It is what you put up there and what your friends put up there that allows the world to ferret through your basically pretty boring life.
Twenty years ago it might have been the equivalent of publishing your diary and personal letters for the world to see. Now tell me: how private is that?
This kind of publicity may be closer to home than you think.
We non-celebs have our own followers on Twitter, waiting to see what we are eating, or if we like a movie, or what we're going to wear. We may not have the pleasure of being pursued by the paparazzi, but there is still the fame of YouTube, online videos of everyone and anyone, all at the click of a mouse.
Countless people do their own online blogs and random videos pop up all the time. Some guy just filmed you through his cellphone and there you are! Famous! Just the other day I saw myself on YouTube doing a Kavanagh Day performance. If I've only just found out about this one, how many others are there I don't know about?
Did I agree?
No.
Privacy is everyone's problem, no matter how famous, infamous or wannabe famous, or even how "invisible" you think you are.
Although we may think it's now hard, if not impossible, to have a private life, how much of this have we brought on ourselves?
We are the ones who make status updates. We accept the friend requests from people we don't know and will never meet. We join Twitter so that we can say we have so many hundreds/thousands of friends.
Do we really know that the creators of Facebook check everything that's loaded?
The police certainly check. So do schools. They say they're checking up on bullying, but how much more do they look at?
Cyberbullying, chat rooms - how safe are we?
It is, of course, entirely feasible that our privacy has gone downhill because we want it to.
Deep inside we're trying to get as much attention as we can.
Really, we're all pretty pathetic.
We don't have real lives; we have fake ones online. Privacy is a right, it is a privilege and it is a necessity. If we choose to let others invade our privacy, then we are fools.
Although there will always be prying, demanding people, I cannot help but think that we are the culprits. So about that secret.
- By Sarah Cutler, Year 12, Kavanagh College
