Privacy Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Privacy - Assignment Example The recording of different aspects of a person’s life can be perceived as having a rather long established history in human society. Over the years, this has however been undergoing a radical transformational change in the type of data collected, the depth of this information as well as its volume. The effect of this transformation is that individuals in society only get to enjoy what are relatively very low levels of privacy. One of the easiest avenues through which privacy violations can potentially occur is through the internet. While most systems and websites require that an individual voluntarily provides private information, it is possible for this information to be illegally acquired through phishing and hacking (Bernal, 12-14). The threat to privacy that is posed by phishing websites and hackers is that people in society are now investing in better and increasingly more expensive computer security systems to ensure that their information and data is secure and remains private. Another effect that privacy is seen to be having on privacy is that countries and societies around the world are now clamoring for lawmakers to formulate and implement better privacy laws to protect them. This was recently brought to a head when it emerge that that the United States national security agency had not only put mobile data on the country’s citizens on surveillance in an attempt to try an fight terrorism, it had also expanded its surveillance to include millions of individuals around the world and this included the German Chancellor (Bihanic, 165). The reducing privacy in society has raised a number of ethical concerns key of which is the threat to the society’s privacy that is posed by the government (Morley, 205). Although some of the actions that are routinely taken by the government such as compelling individuals to identify themselves, database profiling, and conducting physical searches on people’s home can be argued to be done with good