Valerie's Reflection

The news I am looking at is a person, Sidney Hill, who has tried his best to protect his personal information from the internet. He is very aware to the internet. As he mentioned, he only shop at well-known or well established site, he never sign up for email list. He also said that he protect his privacy by “assortment of spammers, identity thieves and other disreputable character lurking in cyberspace.” However, now he has abandoned these efforts he put on protecting his privacy for these years. He is now choosing to consider the benefit and think in the good way that passing personal information online could bring. The reason behind is that, he thinks that no matter how much effort he puts, he still cannot prevent his personal information being disclosed or anonymity in this digital age. The government is also not protecting citizen’s information. The online privacy law has not play any role on the issues. The US government is encourage the clinic doctor to adopt the electronic health record system, which he see it as away to make it easier to reveal personal information online. Selling and collecting data of personal information as a business for many online company and the say “information being stolen online” have emerge in an endlessly, it makes Sidney distrusts the claim of any online privacy.
Sidney’s point of view to the online privacy has also spoke out lot of people’s views to the issues of online privacy. The information flow in cyberspace is too fast and I may argue that even is uncontrollable. And in fact many sites have asked people to provide their personal information. These sites always claim that they will not disclose the information and they will just use the information in an appropriate way or in order to provide the users a better service. Imagine the e-banking systems which ask you to provide real detail information, once the information have been stolen from this system, the consequent is big enough to threat all people and must create a huge social issues. Or the Facebook, always being discussed when talking online privacy issues, the Facebook always have no clear guideline on how your information would be used and how it protects you information. After reading the news and thinking about the term “online privacy” it makes me wonder, in nowadays digital age, do we having any way to protect our personal information? If I am an American, is it possible not to go to hospital or go to see doctor seem my health record may put online? It seems to me that “online” and “privacy” cannot coexist.



Sidney, Hill. “There's No Sense Stressing About the End of Privacy.” ECT News Network, Inc. 15Apr, 2011. 16Apr, 2011.