DCS- Is there such thing as absolutely private?

Privacy if often described as the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one’s private life or affairs. With today’s growing technology is it possible that anything is truly private?

Take Facebook for example , there are so many different elements which come under “privacy settings”, you have to go every single thing separately , wall posts, photos etc and check if you want friends to be able to see them, friends of friends as well or everyone.  Although up until recently they had sort of generic privacy settings which just had everything under one heading and you chose who could see it. However, when it was switched to the new privacy settings it didn’t alert you and you didn’t realise that it had changed the settings. I only found out because someone said something to me about it and I looked and had to change all my settings because it was automatically set so that everybody could see everything on my page.

It’s a bit worrying to think how easily someone could gain access to details of your life through something like Facebook. I personally used to put a lot of things on Facebook without even thinking about it, but after hearing some horror stories on the news I now think twice about it. You hear stories about people saying that they’re going on holiday on Facebook and then coming hoem to find it that they have been burgled because it was evident on Facebook that no-one was going to be there.

 Big news articles in recent years concerning privacy online have been things like the Wikileaks, "The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies" (Leigh, 2010) and in 2007 there was the “lost” disk of 25million UK Child benefit recipients personal details.( BBC, 2007) These stories show the casual nature in which sensitive information is dealt with.

Yet after these horror stories we still willingly put things on Facebook and enter our bank details online to various websites.

So with the complex and fast moving area is it always going to be possible to know if something is actually going to be kept private if it says it is? Well I think in the short term the answer is no.

References:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/privacy
Leigh, D., 2010 US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis Guardian.co.uk Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable-leak-diplomacy-crisis [Accessed 13th march 2011]
BBC News., 2007 UK families put on fraud alert. BBC News.co.uk Available from : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7103566.stm [Accessed 13th march 2011]