Privacy starts with restraint online

opinion@dailylobo.com

In her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes for the esteemed Cecil B. DeMille Award, Jodie Foster said, “If you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy, someday, in the future, people will look back at and remember how beautiful it once was.”

Last week we viewed another side of Taco Bell, namely an employee licking taco shells before placing them on “the line,” where they would be prepared and served to customers. The only reason that anyone knows about his behavior is because he took a picture of himself doing it and put it on Facebook for the world to see. After a short search, Taco Bell uncovered the employee’s identity and fired him and his photographer.

What goes on in our personal emails, cell phones and web profiles is public information. Also, the government has legal right to view our private business, and they do it in the name of protection. You don’t have to be an NSA analyst to see what’s going on in our private lives, though.

Google your name — if your name is common, add your city too — and see what comes up about you. Police already look at profiles searching for sneaky, illegal activity. Who remembers the people who broke into the zoo and posted pictures of themselves in the cages with the animals — only to be caught by the police for trespassing?

I can hear it now: “I would never do something so stupid!” Don’t we all do something similarly stupid every day? We log into an account, we curse in our statuses even if we’re friends with our granny, we post bathing suit photos and pictures in our underwear or less because now “privates” are “publics,” we’re tagged in a friend’s photos of when we were inebriated even if perhaps we’re underage or on probation. We Instagram and it doesn’t bother us that our marijuana habit has just been put online so everyone can see that we’re 4/20 friendly.

These pictures and messages may seem harmless at the time of their posting, but we’ve seen evidence that they can come back at us.

Of course, I know that everyone doesn’t behave this way, but this is for the majority of us who do, myself included. We’re the ones who need to change, especially college students: Our lives are just beginning and we’re already putting roadblocks in. Who’s going to elect a senator who at the age of 23 was smoking a bong in a state where weed wasn’t decriminalized? Sure, it’s petty logic to not elect a good politician because of something so trivial. Ho wever, our American hero, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, got dragged through the coals after a picture of him getting his blaze on went public. Do you think they’ll treat us any differently?

We as a generation are single-handedly murdering the value of face-to-face contact with other humans. Our devices are our trusted companions. Not only are we watching the death of privacy, we’re watching the death of trust. It used to be that you actually had to trust a lover whom you were committed to. Now, if you suspect unfaithfulness, you can look at their text messages. Cell phones, iPods, and computers have made it possible to hide our lives and behave in sneakier ways. We don’t have to answer for what we say when we can just delete a message.

This article was supposed to be about the death of privacy, but let’s be honest here: With the death of privacy comes the loss of so much more than that. To create a persona of yourself online is to create a virtual personality that you will never be able to permanently delete. We’re a generation with the potential to make the difference that our parents and grandparents couldn’t. We are the cure for cancer, we are the legalization of civil rights that really shouldn’t even be illegal to begin with, we are the end of poverty, we are going to abolish racism. However, first we have to put aside the glowing screens and check back into the real world.