Privacy & Confidentiality

When my parents were growing up, all the means of communication were all between the 2 people who were sharing the message (the sender and the receiver). For example, when my parents were young, they would send a letter to someone with whatever message and that letter would only be seen by the person who wrote it and the person who the letter was for. There was very little risk of someone opening the envelope and reading confidential information. Today with new media all of this confidentiality has changed. Today when you send an email to someone, that email is saved in a database server and the people in control of that server have access to all those millions of emails. New media has brought us with this new style of communication in which every message is saved somewhere and it can be retreated from the servers where they are saved. So far it seems that people do not care much for the invasion of their privacy when it comes to text messages and emails. This is well illustrated by the not so big reaction when we all found out that the government had access to all of our calls and messages. This was all possible with the explanation that national security outweighs personal privacy. 

People only seem to care about privacy when its invasion means a direct hit to their personal lives. For example, when the information from your credit card gets stolen, you are directly affected by it as you are losing money. On the merge of this issue, the development of the microchips in credit cards came to light. in the article "Target works on security-heavy credit cards, after breach" by Dara Kerr. We can see how target only became more strict about the ruling on raising security measures after a problem occurred and all the information from credit cards was stolen. I believe that we have become less sensitive to the invasion of privacy, especially since social media like Facebook and Twitter is all about us sharing our personal lives with the world.