Help me with this debate

EdgarAllenPoo

I have a debate on Thursday night and the issue I have to argue against is that privacy is impossible in the day and age.

How the hell do I tackle that. I haven't a breeze what to say. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Teg Veece

I guess you could say something about Google's profiling of individuals. Each time you google, your profile is updated and subsequent ads are targeted to your interests.

The Google personalised homepage (google ig?) is just a cleverly disguised method of associating what you search for with your username.
Gmail scans your emails and shows related ads to the subject matter.

There's a lot more about the cooperation with the "Be nice" motto that's slowly turning into the evil empire. It'd make good material for your debate.

Just google it.

simu

Moving this thread to humanities as it seems to be a general topic

-simu

dr_manhattan

I would suggest that you argue that the whole notion is moot: 'privacy' has never existed until the past 100 or so years. In fact, it could be possible to argue that privacy is an invention of consumer society, trying to convince you to protect something that you never had.

I'll try and explain this viewpoint:

Think about it: most of the world still doesn't own it's own space, only in the so-called first world can you even entertain privacy, without death squads and secret police and the like. And even here in the west, the idea of tenant rights is a twentieth century phenomenon, before that you were vulnerable to landlords, police and criminals in equal measure. The 'right to privacy' was basically what you could physically enforce on your space and property: which was usually nothing.

You could be drafted, press ganged, or just plain run off your land. You could be invaded, annexed or ethnically cleansed: it happened all the time. All it took was a bunch of roughnecks in the middle of the night, and legal or not your privacy no longer existed, if it ever did.

And even if you were a member of an aristocratic elite, you were constantly in the presence of gossiping servants and other gossiping members of your elite class. Your footmen, batmen and chamber maids knew more about you than you did. Your marriage was arranged and your life laid out for you, cradle to grave. Where's 'privacy'? Where's the modern idea of the right to choose and create your own private world?

And if you mess up, then another country takes your 'privacy', or your peasants revolt and take it, or whatever.

Back in poverty land, a lot of the time your wife could be taken from you by your landowner... there's a million different ways to rubbish the idea of 'privacy'. Seclusion, perhaps: a hermit lifestyle. But that's not privacy, it's remoteness. Anyone wishing to violate it can do so, no problem, they just have to find you.

Using this argument you can say that privacy is just as possible now as it ever was: there's no "in this day and age" about it.

Once you've done that, you can argue that actually for the first time in history, the concept of privacy exists: the government cannot take or control your life as it once could (the draft, national service, laws protecting you from the police and the like) and you can complain to the authorities based on firmly outlined rights enshrined in law.

This was not always the case, not by a long shot. A cursory examination of summary executions performed by the irish free state in its infancy can show you that actually, we have more rights than ever. Surely the right to not be pulled out of your bed and shot is a form of privacy?

Hope that helps.

humbert

On a practical level we live in an age of free anonymous wifi internet access, unregistered prepay mobile phones, rampant identity fraud, far less personal social interaction on both an official and community level than there used to be.

We are living in an age before biometric scanning is commonplace, where you can still pay in cash for almost anything, including your accommodation, and 3v vouchers allow modest anonymous credit card transactions.

As the illegal immigration problem in various countries(even island countries like Britain and our own) demonstrates you can move between a lot of countries without detection, not to mention legal movement throughout the E.U.