Can There Be Privacy in the Information Age?

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1. Introduction In a time in which new technologies make it easy to gather and process data, protection of personal data tends to be the main focus of discussion whenever the issue of privacy is being discussed or examined. Privacy is far more than this. Privacy is in fact the safeguard of personal freedom--the safeguard of the individual's freedom to decide who he is, what he does, and who knows about it. Any restriction on privacy thus means an infringement of personal freedom. And it is this freedom that plays crucial role in every democracy. Privacy is a culturally relative notion and difficult to define. For our purposes it relates only to information about oneself. More precisely, it is a constraint on the diffusion of information deemed especially important to one, and whose diffusion would give others more control of one's life, or embarrass one, etc. As population and densities increase, the urban megalopolis grows and the need for private spaces, physical and personal, increases. There are great differences in the secrecy of such personal information. 2. Current Situation The new emergence of technologies has giving us the luxury of doing everything from the comfort of our homes. Our shopping and banking activities could be done through the computer or television, research could be carried out anywhere around the world through internet and we can even talk to ourselves face to face via the internet. Everyone has the right to privacy but in this age of information, it is so difficult to know where the limits of privacy begin and end. It is not an overstatement to state that one in every two persons has his/her data base profile stored somewhere either by government, health service or marketing organisations. For example, driver’s licence ID number, email account, medical record numbers, bank account numbers, credit and debit card numbers and so on.

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