Unfortunately We Give Up Privacy Voluntarily

There was a time where every individual’s privacy had meaning behind it. With the growing surge of social networks, identity theft, and other information breaches, individual privacy is a thing of the past. Even reality shows have opened the doors to revealing a lot more than we need to know about the lives of anyone who appears on the entertainment medium. The more we utilize social networks to tell the world of our activities, the more we have opened ourselves to no longer owning privacy in its purest state. From BlackBerrys to iPhones, moving to GPS devices, Google tracking, and now Facebook and Twitter, we allow more pieces of our personal data to enter the electronic atmosphere.

Credit cards track our movements whenever we patronize a storefront. Traffic cameras know where we are, while toll stickers alert the very states we reside in where we are at certain times of the day. And while we oppose the amount of information collected on us, we give away more data than we really should.

Online applications such as Google are a blessing, storing our emails, appointments and other calendar data in the cloud, but we store company information in our notes, and possibly sensitive professional data along with our personal information at the same time without thinking of the ramifications. It is nice to add comments about the upcoming meeting, including confidential information as a reminder, but it also places the data in an area open for possible and eventual viewing. Individuals immediately subscribe to the long and lengthy Terms of Agreements printed in small fonts, and why bother reading them? We provide permission for the supplying company to hold our data, quietly hoping our data will stay away from prying eyes.

Social networking takes our information privacy bit by bit. From the personal stats we put in our profile to the things we post for everyone to read, the tiny threads continually add up to a larger picture that says who we are, what we are doing and where it is being performed. The smallest infraction conducted with the information arrives in the form of online marketing, and more spam than we care to read or receive. The most egregious forms arrive as blackmail.

The owner of Brainlink International Inc, Raj Goel, had this to say. "Privacy is disappearing due to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and blogs that are ushering a generation of kids and adults who do not understand privacy or the ability to truly understand that digital content is never forgotten or destroyed. Years down the line, childeren will be Googling their parent's spring break pictures and Facebook profiles.”

More and more, we accept the various devices to speed us through our day. Radio frequency identification cards allow us to bypass long lines and purchase fuel when we need it. Discount cards and other shopping club cards know when we visited their stores. Our habits tell a great deal of information about us. Julie Davis Friend, the president of a company that provides advice on topics involving identity theft and legalities, mentions, "Include RFID chips, the Real ID Act and the PASS Act. We have a false sense of security. Individuals do not realize they are giving away their rights to privacy.”

The Patriot Act was the breaking point of our privacy rights. For years we frowned upon the government extending their power into our personal lives, then immediately signed away our privacy rights and most happily did so. And lost a significant amount of civil liberties in the process we may never gain back. As quoted by one security expert, "The Patriot Act gave wide and far reaching powers to law enforcement to come into your home with 'probable cause' and warrantless."

The GPS we rely upon to aid us in transporting from one point to another betrays us. Either a car arrives with GPS or we have one installed. Our phones provide us with free nav applications or we can download them with ease. The vendors on the other end have the ability to annotate our present locations whether we want them to or not.

Even your Kindle e-reader tracks your habits. What you’ve read, how many times you have read it, and it has the ability to completely delete your e-books without you knowing about it until after the fact.

Training and education including CISSP training brings security awareness, decreasing the amount of information users unintentionally leak to less than secure sources. Organizational security, security risk management, access control, network security, and telecommunications are a small set of topics included in a solid information security training course. Online Training Direct is an excellent location and source of quality training in the data security field, among other IT topics and issues.

As individuals become more and more savvy about data security, they begin to note how they can protect themselves from an unfortunate circumstance. Raj Goel noted, "The FTC could take on Facebook, Myspace and other sites that target kids the same way they expanded HIPAA's scope and brought online health care databases under their purview. When my government grows up, I want them to be the FTC -- the only national agency that's done anything meaningful about consumer privacy and security in the past decade."

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