By Sarah Allan

Classes, clothes, and cliques. I attend high school but I will not be talking about schoolyard gossip. My name is Sarah Allan; I am a grade twelve student whose main goal for writing is to explore the obscure and fascinating things of our world. These will be local, international, and historic experiences. My pieces will consist not just of words, but of photographs to complement these ideas. My broad high school education has taught me many things: from calculus to history. Most importantly of all, it has forced me to interpret the world around me. Do not look any further, my articles will teach the “other” things that were not learned in school.

With technology comes advancement in medicine, business, and communication. However, with those expansions has come increasing accessibility of information. The quality that makes technology the most practical also makes it dangerous. Encroaching technology can be linked to the erosion of public privacy.

In Britain, surveillance is a common fixture. There are up to 4.2 million* security cameras monitoring the public. However degrading privacy does not stop there. Proposed to pass on March 15 is a new law that requires Internet Service Providers to store information about every email sent or received. As a result, around three billion e-mails* will be kept daily, and made available to public bodies upon request. Situations of this nature are much more widespread than the average consumer realizes.

Latitude is a recently launched program by Google, which lets people share their geographical location with friends. This feature operates off a cell phones’ hardware and is used to track personal location. Government and law enforcement bodies have used this technology for location tracking before. However the privacy concern arises when it is accessible to the general population, including teenagers. This does not mean that any person can track a location; the user has to mutually agree to share it with friends. Technology such as this has started to chip away at the safety mechanism called privacy. Even though there is a decision as to who can view location, there is still the underlying thought that people have the power to know exactly where an individual is at any given time. .

Technology has given great civil liberties, connecting people worldwide, and providing access to information. However it can just as easily take those liberties away. Access to information in the blink of an eye comes at the price of public privacy. With technology advancing at an exponentially increasing rate, who will protect our basic right to privacy?

*Source: BBC News