Monday, July 21, 2008

Your Privacy

Some would rather die than to change. That is a frightening thing to consider. Imagine being so entrenched in your habits or thinking that it becomes easier to trade your life as compared to making some adjustments in your life. We are all confronted with that decision every day and I'm sad to say most of us make the wrong choice. We eat the wrong foods, ignore health warnings our bodies scream at us every day. Someone once said we dig our graves with our teeth. Will today's' greasy hamburger take you down? Probably not, but eat three or four of them every week and you will soon understand the effect of compounded errors in judgement.

So it is with the trade off between our individual privacy and the convenience of databased information. As a people we seem to be quite willing to trade one for the other. And this is most assuredly a trade off. That's a societal right. Societies have to determine for themselves what is tolerable and what isn't. It is impossible to maintain individual privacy in our databased world, that is the fact of the matter. And so long as our individual pieces of data have value there will be a trade market in that value. In fact there will be two markets, the first where companies sell your information, and the second where people steal it. Again, that is reality. So long as we take into account what we risk when we consciously opt for convenience then we must accept the reality of identity misuse and theft.

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