Reading & Activity #5

To me, privacy means being able to live my life in peace without fear of intervention from the government unless I am doing something that would potentially harm others.  I believe that a person should not have to worry about the government or private organizations being able to look at their personal belongings (including email, and cyber information) unless that person is doing something illegal.  I believe that many policies that are currently enforced by the government are outdated, and they do not cover many of the new technologies that are integrated into today’s society.  This makes it easier for the government to look at people’s personal information legally.  I believe that privacy of private personal information is very important, and that many governmental policies should be reevaluated and updated with our quickly changing society.  The article, “Facebook & your privacy” talks about this “privacy.”  It reveals how truly available all our personal information is when we don’t limit what we put on different social media.  The article ranges from talking about keeping social media limited to people over the age of thirteen, all the way to employers viewing people’s Facebook pages when making job decisions.  The article goes through how to work Facebook’s privacy settings to show users how to better protect their information.  This is helpful because the article also talks about how there were numerous instances were users did not have their posts protected, and they said where they were going for the day, and their houses were robbed.  When describing my views of privacy, I talked about a very quickly changing world and how policies have to be updated in order to compensate for all the new technology.  This article is a perfect example of this due to the new problems that these new changing technologies have given rise to, such as cyber-bullying, false identities, and having access to too much data about people.  These are problems that are not addressed in today’s policies, so we must make changes in order to protect citizens privacy and livelihood.