Abusing Your Privacy

Talk to just about anyone under the age of 25 about their privacy expectations, and they will tell you that they don’t have any. What happens on the Web does in fact seem to stay on the Web. For these younger denizens, with decades of life ahead, the thought that their teenaged and young adult indiscretions’ living with them forever might not have sunk in just yet. But there are credit applications, security checks and job applications looming, perhaps a few political aspirations along the way. And exactly how much time needs to have passed before financial difficulty in one time in a person’s life is no longer relevant?

Too many people filter themselves out of political candidacies because of a distant, but irrelevant youthful indiscretion. While the era of “I didn’t inhale” (former President Bill Clinton’s explanation of his marijuana moments) may have passed, we still live in an era where anything negative is news (Karl Rove’s recent rather false assessment of Hillary Clinton’s having “brain damage” dominated newscasts for days), and most things positive are not. We’re digging and scraping for dirt, since voyeuristic and biased news services crave this information, but the good seems relegated to resumes and internal memos.

With NSA and credit evaluation agencies, marketing powerhouses and even hackers sucking up and storing intense levels of personal information, to be stashed away forever in their massive file servers, most of America continues with daily life not knowing how someday this information can be used to alter their futures in extremely negative ways. Not even knowing what this information might be or even how to change it should it be known but proven false, we have entered a period of self-destruction, under the guise of “security” or “prudence,” that ultimately could make life increasingly intolerable for most of us. By the time information devastation hits an average person between the eyes, it is often too late to do anything about it.

Europe seems to care about this reality, but regulation-averse America does not. “The European Union's highest court ruled [May 13^th] that search engines such as Google -- the defendant in this case -- must evaluate requests, particularly from private citizens, to have links to damaging content removed from its search engines. If there's no public interest reason for the links to stay a part of the search engine's results, then they must be removed.

“The case stems from a complaint filed by a Spanish doctor who found that references to a debt he'd paid still showed up prominently in Google search results for his name. But the ruling, which is now binding in all of the European Union's 28 member states, is the latest in what's emerged as a particularly European approach to the protection of online privacy.

“The European Union has been far more aggressive than others on the issue of digital privacy, often butting heads with American companies that assert that the pressure to respond to requests to remove links, or to orders such as celebrity super injunctions, are a form of censorship. The argument is that Internet users have a right to freedom of expression and information, and that purging information from search engines, except in extreme cases, violates that freedom. Further complicating the question is that companies such as Google don't publish the content themselves but point to existing information -- raising questions about how liable they should be for information displayed on their services.” Washington Post, May 13^th.

Because we live in a country where sophisticated political manipulation has equated reasonable and necessary regulation as Godless and un-American, Americans live in a world where not only are average and below-average income earners relegated to second class status, but the very rules and regulations to make life tolerable – clean air and water, reasonable expectations of privacy and transparency with a level financial playing field – are considered evil intrusions by government by a huge segment of our society. As educational standards plunge for average Americans, could it be that we have become so stupid and ill-informed that we can no longer apply common sense rules to our daily lives? Google Glass anyone?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if America will ever be able to wake up from this deep, fact-ignoring mental trance.