In this digital age is your information safe? How much of your interests do you share with the online databases you use? Will privacy become obsolete?

Databases collect information that you search. These topics could have very incriminating or personal details about a person’s life. Databases, like Google, are able to use this information for their own use and third-party searches. Omer Tene states in his article What Google Knows: Privacy and Interest Search Engines, “Every day, millions of users provide Google with unfettered access to their interests, needs, desires, fears, pleasures, and intentions. Many users do not realize that this information is logged and maintained in a form which can facilitate their identification.” This information can also be criminal and used against the searcher during a trial. Is this system approaching a Big Brother level of control? Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report, has a system of surveillance that uses preemptive attempts of constraint to reduce crime.

Similarly, in Bentham’s “Panopticon,” he describes a prison system of such complete surveillance that those subject to it begin an unconscious process of self-surveillance.  If surveillance is instilling personal unconscious systems of control is that inhibiting our right to privacy? How much surveillance is too much? Is the U.S. reaching that point?

The internet provides an immediate source of information capturing. This type of surveillance is new and evolving. The amount of control this grants databases is extensive. How much of our information will we learn to censor? How much of our detailed, personal data will we allow the system to use against us?