“It is our lack of awareness of the extent to which we are surveilled that often serves as one of the strengths of the system.” (David Parry)

We live in a world where privacy is taken for granted. We all think we have privacy, but that really just isn’t the case. Just ask Congresswoman Jane Harman. (But that’s a whole other issue.) Personally I don’t think anything brought up in the Perry introduction was new or groundbreaking. The only people who might be alarmed by this reading would be those who are not technology savvy and those who don’t watch the news.

But for the sake of those who are not consciously aware of their surroundings, it can seem very scary and intimidating to know you are always being watched. It’s not exactly comforting to know that Google probably has a giant file containing all of your personal habits. As pointed out in “What Google Knows: Privacy and Internet Search Engines” article by Omer Tene, Google has access to so many of our personal preferences. They have a digital fingerprint that explains our greatest fears, wants, needs, etc.

If you’re big on current events, you may have noticed that Google has recently come under fire for changing their privacy policy.  In this article on CNN I found it most disturbing that Google does not even attempt to conceal the fact that they are playing cyberspace Big Brother. Google knows they are harvesting information from us, and they want to keep doing so without raising too many eyebrows.

But we as consumers have no power to turn away from these search engine powerhouses if we wish to use the internet to its fullest capability. As pointed out by Tene, we still need to define what privacy means. Is the data collection that Google does really invasive? If I’m doing nothing illegal does it really matter if Google knows that I looked up “Best ways to cure constipation” or am I just too OCD that some computer geek might see that and go into a fit of giggles? Or do I just blissfully ignore the fact that I’m being monitored and pretend that I don’t know what Google is watching me.

Google and other search engines bring up quite a few ethical questions that I believe will be addressed more and more by Congress within the next decade. It’s something we all need to think wisely and carefully about because this is our information and our fingerprints that are being held hostage by a company somewhere in Palo Alto.