Privacy… Do We Still Have It?

That is often the question I ask myself now a days.

We have accustom to having our identity recorded by the respective governments. Reduced ourselves to a number; in most cases this is in the form of a Government issued ID card, Drivers License, Passport, Social Security, etc. We always trusted these government entities to maintain our private information in a secure manner.

While our lives slowly involved online presences over the past 10 years, we began trusting non-government entities to maintain pieces of our identity.

These online presences resulted in the manifest of virtual social hacking. The act of gathering pieces of information from various sources, in an attempt to build a full picture of an identity. Social hacking is not something new. Traditionally this was done through the use of trash that people throw out, stolen pieces of mail from mailboxes and crank calls.

As we move forward and the fact that digital living is now prevalent. We shall settle with the fact that third parties will have pieces of private information about us. We need to learn how to protect ourselves while at the same time reaps the benefits of these online presences.

Each time before we place any pieces of information onto the Internet we need to pause, and consider whether we like to have this piece of information online forever. If the answer is “no” do not place this piece of information online for fraction of a second. Doing so is like publishing it onto an archive. The Internet has numerous servers scraping information and archiving these information forever.

Is the situation so grim that we do not have any privacy? Well that depends on how you balance the right amount of information placed online to benefit from the services offered, while still protecting your most private information.

Let’s be safe and enjoy what the Internet services offer.

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