If anyone had asked me in secondary school whether I intended to share my private self with the world, I would have certainly said no. Tell strangers about myself? No way!
Now, I have to eat my own words. I have to say that my opinion has not completely changed since then. However, I know and accept that complete privacy from people, even strangers, is entirely impossible. Being affiliated with services that permit us to divulge personal information about oneself puts privacy out of the picture. However, each and every one of us has the ability to control exactly how much information we expose to the public. It is our own ability to decide what level of privacy we are willing to give up.
So what exactly is privacy?
Privacy refers to the capacity for an individual (or a group) to remain out public scrutiny. Their personal information and lives are not kept in the limelight. (Privacy, 2007) Is it always easy to remain private? The truth is that it is not easy. Every single signal that we send out, whether it is in online or offline situations, reveals something about us. There is an extremely thin line between public and private circumstances.
Trust and Privacy
When do we let down our guard and reveal personal tidbits about ourselves? In today’s society, it has become a necessity to prove one’s trustworthiness constantly. (Rosen, 2004) We are constantly emitting signals that ensure others that we are being truthful, and the best way to do that would be to divulge personal information. It is similar to tit-for-tat situation.
But are we really telling the truth?
I wouldn’t say that I am a completely private person. There are a select few who know me inside out, and then there are others who know general common things about me. So I guess I can safely say that I have a control over the amount personal information I reveal. The issue of trust is significant to me. Like anybody else, I wouldn’t want to share personal things about myself to people who I find hard to trust.
To prove to myself that I really do not reveal anything personal about myself, I went to check my FRIENDSTER profile. I realized that I hadn’t exactly updated my personal profile in a year, and the previous time I had logged on to update my profile, it was actually to remove some information from my profile. As I tried to recall the exact reason as to why I had done such a thing, I realized that my main motivation was because that I shared too much information about myself. Looking at what was left on my profile, I realized the information that I had chosen to share were general things that people will discover about me within the first few days that they have met me. So does this truly mean that I am a private person? Or do I reveal too much?
Is anything private?
When I thought about my profile more, I realized that I never really bothered with my privacy as much as I thought I had. Although I do remain anonymous when I choose to view my friends’ profiles, I never actually selected the option that allows us to set our personnel profiles for private use only. In that sense, aren’t I actually putting myself in the limelight?
The act of giving your telephone number to the store clerk may seem insignificant, but you will never know when information that you had just given out might be used against you. (Sullivan, 2007) Similarly, I may have thought that the information I have placed on my FRIENDSTER profile might be unimportant, but I will never know for certain if this information will come back to haunt me in the future. So maybe I should just leave my profile empty.
Privacy or Paranoia? Now that’s another issue altogether.
References
Privacy. (2007, March 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 8, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Privacy&oldid=113354124
Rosen, J. (2004, 19 July). The Naked Crowd. Retrieved March 7, 2007 from the http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA5FF.htm
Sullivan, B. (2007, 17 October). Privacy Lost: Does anybody care? Retrieved March 8, 2007, from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221095/print/1/displaymode/1098/
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