Privacy: A tale of discomfort

 "Once you've lost your privacy, you realize you've lost an extremely valuable thing."

-Billy Graham

According to Wikipedia, Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.

Privacy is one of the most important things in an individual's life. But in the era of science and technology are we having enough privacy?

The answer is quite simple. No. But the consequences of this simple answer is rather complicated.

People in our age tend to express themselves as much as they can through technology. They want to reach out to others. It's quite obvious that humans will try to socialize as much as possible but what is not obvious is how we are giving our valuable information to some unknown, untrustworthy folks on the internet. Some might bargain that how can companies like Google and Facebook play with our information, they have policies to protect our information right?

Yeah they do have policies. But they also have policies which gives them the right to share your information with the government, agencies, companies even sell your information to creepy people. That's the reason why Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and many more CEO's were called to the US Congress. In the meantime people don't only visit Facebook or Google. There's 2 billion more websites on the internet.

Some might ask what's so special about this internet privacy stuff? Well let me inform you what could happen if your privacy is not your privacy anymore.

People can access your personal information.

They can get involved in your personal life.

They can track you down and do harm to you.

They can blackmail you.

They can steal your money and resources.

Your information will be sold to foreign governments which can later result in a very difficult situation both for you and our country.

These are just the tip of an iceberg. 

In these circumstances what can we do to protect our information? 

Actually there's nothing much we can do. There's trackers everywhere on the internet. The best thing we can do is use the least amount of our information on the internet and ask our policymakers to make policies that truely protect our privacy.