Privacy, a Commodity

Everybody’s public unless you buy your privacy.

Photo from stock.xchng

I looked for opportunities to sell my phone online. eBay and Craigslist are good options but I did my research to know if there’s another way to sell it faster. After that, the ads in the webpages I visit are by gazelle.com, a website that buys gadgets. This happens to you as well.  Our activities online were tracked and the ads we see are customized according to our interests.

It’s not only online where we are scouted. Go to a store and see yourself in the monitor as you move in the CCTV camera. Travel abroad and they’ll require your photo for the immigration. Apply for jobs, sign up for a service, download anything – almost in everywhere you’ll have records of what you did and where you’ve been.

Researchers from the German Institute for Economic Research and the University of Cambridge investigated whether people will pay more money for privacy. People are willing to give their phone numbers when buying movie tickets as long as they’re paying less.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers countered this study. Their results show that people will pay 60 cents more for a $15 item to protect their privacy.

Products like Evernote, a terrific notes software, will ask you to buy premium just to get rid of Ads. If you’re poor, you wouldn’t pay for premium. You’ll stick with free and get used to the parties tracking your activities for relevant ads posting. If you can afford, you can buy and disappear just like that.

In this time where privacy was becoming a luxury commodity, are you willing to pay for it?

Sources:
What Would You Pay for Privacy?; The New York Times
Study: Shoppers will pay for privacy; CNet

Are We Heading Towards A Big Brother World?

More and more CCTV cameras are popping up all around the world in any place from outside banking institutions to parks.

Photo from Anders Sandberg’s flickr

Everywhere you go, you seem to be watched at some point or another – in fact in the U.K you can be watched up to 300 times a day.

Is the Big Brother fantasy from the book “Nineteen Eighty Four” becoming a reality? Slowly but surely is probably the answer.

Especially so in the United Kingdom, which is the most watched nation on earth – with a reported one camera to every 14 people as of 2008 (a total of 4,2 million). Other nations around the world are extending their use of CCTV.

On the one hand – if anything does ever happen to you in the street, it will all be caught on camera and thus creates the idea of safety through a sense of security.

The argument is why do we need so many cameras in our cities and towns?

Just imagine, for one moment, we lived in a Big Brother world – where every action was watched and monitored. Would you be happy with this lifestyle?

Surely it’s an invasion of privacy to have so much CCTV surveillance following us wherever we go, as well as a violation of data protection.

It creates the feeling that we are being watched for no real reason other than so people higher up can keep an eye on us.

According to a YouGov poll, the majority of people are in full support of CCTV cameras – thinking they will keep us secure and safe. But would you trade an ounce of liberty for a lifetime of high level security?

The worrying factor is that more CCTV cameras will appear, as if there aren’t enough already. More so worrying is that the next step is for these cameras to feature high-powered microphones to monitor your conversations.

Whilst I can not deny that crime solving could be made a lot easier, I am in the majority when I say I have never broken the law and had no intention of doing so. I feel like my privacy is being severely invaded.

Do you think CCTV is a good thing or do you feel your privacy is being severely invaded?