What's left of right of privacy?

I remember sometime in the 70s, when I was kid, a big controversy erupting when it was revealed that either the CIA or the FBI, or both, conducted domestic reconnaissance programs, spying on average US citizens and then amassing the private information in secretly held files. People were outraged by the abuse of what was back then considered the fundamental civil right of privacy and I believe, though can't state as fact, that the Freedom of Information act was in some part a result of the scandal. In the 70s, government snooping into the private lives of citizens was considered unconscionable; boy, have times changed.

Nowadays, thanks to technological progress, there is very little personal information that isn't known by either the government or Google. The information age, heralded by the personal computer and entrenched with the explosion of digital technology that followed, has made every activity and interaction an information gathering opportunity, or at least it seems that way. Buying an extension cord at Radio Shack requires what amounts to a five minute survey on your spending habits before the clerk can open the register to give you your 37 cents in change; using a credit or debit card to pay for something, it turns out, is a more efficient and extensive variation on the scheme in that it bypasses variables such as an individual's reluctance to share or, as in my case, intentional vagueness and obfuscation, by recording every detail of every transaction.

The purpose of this information gathering, of course, is that with the digital revolution, information has been commoditized; so now when they make a profit on the sale to you, they can make a second profit on the sale of you. Any objections one my have to the collection and sale of personal information is rendered futile when the most mundane of routine but necessary tasks is complicit in the process; and most people don't object because the technology is framed as a benefit to the consumer, something that facilitates the routine and/or improves the quality of life.

The integration of the Internet with our lives has also contributed to the change of attitude concerning privacy. As much as it is a useful and beneficial tool, it too is also a means of gathering and disseminating an individual's personal information. It perhaps is even potentially more pernicious in that it operates more elusively in the background while at the same time the user operates, to a varying degree depending on individual savvy, under a false sense of anonymity. What one is willing to reveal about themselves on the Internet is vastly different than in a department store or supermarket.

Predictably, with this kind of technology, some people have found ways to use it in ways that are more damaging to the individual. Now that information can be monetarily quantified, it can be stolen, and indeed, identity theft is the newest cutting edge in crime, causing much media hand wringing. Local news, magazines and newspapers have offered countless stories about its horrors; a cottage industry has even sprung up offering identity theft protection services.
What doesn't get talked about much in the media, or interpersonally, and is more nefarious than the increase in junk mail caused by businesses selling personal information, is the government surveillance of private citizens. I remember the scandal of the 70s and learned what governments are capable of and what the individual has the right to expect and demand of the government. Since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, 9/11, and the subsequent legislative actions, most notably the Patriot Act, there has been no transparency or oversight or even information on government activity. That is scary and hopefully that will change with Barak Obama.

In the meantime, as someone who is obsessively private, I long ago developed a mechanism that is part denial and part ignorance for coping with this nightmarish situation; the alternative would be permanently paralyzing paranoia.

Smile...