Is Personal Privacy a casualty of the Modern Age?

“Gone are the days where people used Internet actually as Internet.”

“Being a scientist, I am researching on a topic through which I want to earn some good revenue and royalty from my pattern. I used to save my daily progress and documentation on my local drive of the machine; So, I was in the impression that I am safe and my research is private to me “only”. And now I got to know that my local drive is actually not local and being spied by Government agencies just to confirm that my research is not involved with any malicious or unhealthy community like Terrorism. Huh, now my project was not private to me only, knowingly or unknowingly it has been disclosed. Where has my privacy gone? Huh, sounds scary, doesn’t it?”

Well, it was a layman example to realize that how much concerned we are about our privacy and confidentiality. Even we are so much concerned about the privacy of garbage, then why not with the privacy of virtual life in the modern age?

Internet is designed to share, collaborate and communicate together. Internet made things pretty simple; socialization became so effective and quick. People actually started leveraging such services offered by giant social media players such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and nevertheless Twitter. We put most of our private data using different or same social media on cloud including our Emails, contacts, Photographs, Business plans, Marketing strategies and other private or public stuff.

On top of this, we try our best to protect our data being hosted on “trusted platform” like Facebook, Google etc by enabling Mobile notification to monitor any unexpected activity, control users, hide your profile from being search, disallow anyone to write on your wall etc. In fact We try to follow industries best practices to control our data by accessing sites only over secure protocols such HTTPs using strong cipher suite etc. The bottom line is to keep our data private and only private!

What is Privacy actually?

Privacy is a basic human right. A requirement of maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. Theory says that “The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; freedom from interference or intrusion”.

We always consider ourselves safe yet our privacy is often breached. US had begun a project in early 2007 named PRISM, executed and managed by the NSA (National Security Agency). PRISM is a security surveillance program. PRISM collects mass data and isolates them from nine participating internet companies. These companies had to join PRISM under government law enforcement. These companies have joined this program within the last 6 years include: Microsoft (2010), Yahoo (2008), Google (2009), Facebook (2009), PalTalk (2009), YouTube (2010), Skype (2011), AOL (2011), and Apple (2012). The massive data collection as recorded on April 5th 2013, showed about 117,675 active investigation targets were recovered from the participating companies.

The process of PRISM interface begins as an NSA supervisor gives the go signal for the called “selectors”. Selectors are based on the criteria that each target is at least 51% under “reasonable belief” to be likely a foreigner who is not within the US territory at the time of data gathering. We can clearly see that our virtual life is in a cage and under control by PRISM. Communication medium including Live chats, Personal Messages (which are no longer personal now), pictures, VoIP calls and Financial Transaction.

Reduced privacy is the fact of modern life.

Doesn't it sound as “Hey, you got the news? The age of privacy is over.”?

By considering the facts, I believe that we all should follow the privacy as a casualty. However, your personal ethics must guide your decisions concerning Technology.