Internet and Privacy

The use of internet has been increasing over a decade. Almost 40% of world population are using internet. Not only developing countries but also developed countries are significantly showed the growing of internet users. It means that our world is becoming smaller when in the future everybody worldwide, virtually is connected through internet. World is only a global village now.

Internet users share a lot of information on internet. There is data explosion which is being produced and accessed. In 2012, totally 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was produced daily. More than 2 million search queries are being done every minute by Google, more than 100 million emails are sent every minute and 350 GB of data is processed on Facebook every minute. 

Privacy becomes the new concern. Privacy itself can be simply explained as the right to be autonomous or have some space. A lot of people use internet service without being aware about the issue of privacy. We don’t really know what happen to the data we leave, where the data is gone and who will access the data. The fact is we create digital footprint when we use internet.  

Do we have control of our privacy? David Brin argues that privacy is impossible. According to Brin (1998) in his book that “powerful (government and corporation) will have privacy-invasive technology”. He argues that ideally both the powerful and the common people have the same capacity to monitor and check each other. It is a basic human nature that people enjoy dominating and gain some advantages from other. So, there is a skeptical view in the future about internet privacy issue. The equal transparent access of internet is still a utopia dream.   

Reference:
Brin, D (1998) The Transparent Society. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 12(2), pp. 514.