“We must protect our citizens’ privacy – the bulwark of personal liberty, the safe guard of individual creativity.” The following statement was made by the former US president Bill Clinton. But, what does a privacy mean to you? Is there any threat to a society in an absence of privacy? Will anarchy be the result, in absence of privacy? Why are we even questioning privacy? May be because we are living in a world where the control of information is getting into the hands of corporate bodies. Google and Facebook are the two biggest companies that store your personal information to the depth of your daily activities.
Facebook knows all of your interest and your communication with your friends. On the other hand, Google holds information about your daily internet activity from YouTube to search habits. Are we giving too much to the corporate industries or are they justified for our own benefit?
There is no doubt that people have become more and more open to the Internet. They are sharing their personal interests and communicating with their friends in an open platform. Facebook have certainly been the catalyst in this cultural change. May be we are seeing the different sides of humanity. May be what we pre-assumed to be a ‘privacy threat’ is not really the matter of concern to the development of personal creativity. Google and Facebook have created a platform that have helped people to express and be confident about themselves and in way have helped them to be more creative.
As a result, the idea of privacy may not really be the safe-guard of creativity. But Government bodies have showed its reluctance to accept the changing culture and have pressured these companies to change its policies and encourage privacy. Is privacy the concern of government, for their own safety? There is no doubt that openness is a hurdle for government to hold information for their own selfish reasons.
Thus, we can see many changes in policies being made by both Google and Facebook. On the contrary, there is vast difference in their methods. Google has become more aggressive to control the flow of the internet by their never ending innovations in their products and services, whereas Facebook is allowing users to have more control over their information. In a way, they are moving in opposite directions.
Facebook is more concerned with creating effective communication between people, whereas Google is concerned more in explaining why it’s necessary to be open. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt have himself stated that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines –including Google –do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
The question is not if the act or steps of Google and Facebook is right or wrong because both of them are driven by their business priorities and their urge for innovation. The question is if privacy is really a big issue. Today, an organization can approximately know the sentiment of people towards them. They can also know the reasons behind them. Today, Government is more exposed to people’s criticism and this is the result of openness in the internet. Isn’t this a great opportunity for the world to be more informed which will allow people to make better decisions?
On the other hand, the biggest argument for privacy is the drawback of openness and its fatal influence on people’s decision- the very factor which is good is also bad. We all know of the condition where an individual can be highly influenced by the decision of the tribe. So by allowing openness are we confining the creativity? Because humans have a tendency to follow the tribe rather than lead them.
As a conclusion to this argument, maybe we should understand that the civilization doesn’t exist if there is no balance between the two points. We continuously see in the Internet, the randomness of ideas whose existence is the sole result of creativity. When an idea exists for its own reason, even in a crowd of influenced people than that is truly a creativity which stood the harness of criticism.A
