Right to Privacy Online(Response #10)

It was my senior year of high school, and a friend and myself planned a Halloween party to be held at a convention hall in town. We booked a DJ, had light works, fog machines, and spent a good amount of money on decorations. The night of the party, there were three cop cars parked outside of the convention hall and were stopped before we could enter the hall by two officers who inquired about our nationalities. I told them I am Filipina, but then they became concerned when they found out that my friend is half Vietnamese and half Caucasian. Apparently, the cops were there to prevent an Asian gang war that was said to happen at our party. Two Asian gangs from Hartford were supposedly exchanging conversations on the net and came across an online invitation for our party and decided to settle their differences there. With cops in the parking lot all throughout the party, needless to say, nothing happened and it was a fun and successful night. During the party preparations, my friend and I were thankful of how easy the Internet will make it possible to advertise our party and the efficiency of emailing invitations. However, we did not think of the matters of privacy. In our case, the invasion of our privacy had a positive result since an alleged gang war was prevented, though I do not believe that any invasion of privacy usually provides the same positive result. While we are glad that a supposed gang war didn’t happen that night since our privacy has been breached it left an unsettling feeling how privacy online can easily be violated.

“Privacy for Sale,” by A.L Shapiro writes, “the privatization of privacy protection will create as many dilemmas as it solves, if not more” (160). Shapiro argues that privatization will only be beneficial to those who can afford it and those who cannot will continually have their privacy violated, hence creating a bigger dilemma socially, as opposed to solving the problem of the invasion of privacy.

Personally, I feel that privacy coincides with the advancement of interactive communications. Interactive communications is a fairly new media as compared to the more established ones such as print and broadcast journalism, film, and television. As people become more educated and come to find that whenever they log on, they will be giving up their right to privacy, more and more people will be turned off by it, hence becoming a hindrance in the medium’s success and development.

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