<p>Nevermind… (10 chars)</p>
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<p>People who grow up taking something for granted tend to be complacent about it. I have friends of a variety of ages, and the ones who have the most practical Internet sense are the ones who are young enough to be technology/Internet-oriented, but old enough that they remember when it was still a novel thing, a frontier (and to some extent, old enough to be more mature but not old enough to be likely to be technophobes, but I gather that they had more sense even when they were younger than current kids). This would be the people who are currently in their mid-to-late 20s.</p>
<p>My son says we’re massively kidding ourselves if we think there is any such thing as privacy anymore. I tend to think he’s right.</p>
<p>Even if you’re overly careful, someone else will still snap a pic of you drunk and put it on their own page.</p>
<p>Sorry, my original post was a bit too specific so I deleted it. My point was that I’ve heard 4 stories in the past week of teens posting things on the internet, apparently thinking only the people they WANTED to see it would see it:</p>
<p>1) Middle schoolers who posted camera-phone video of a fight on YouTube. The school and police watched it, notified parents, and filed charges.</p>
<p>2) 7th grade girls taking pictures of themselves in various stages of undressing, and posting it on their Myspace pages. Apparently, they think if their name is “KateheartsBill” and they say they are 47 years old and live in Zimbabwe, they can post whatever they want and parents, teachers, unfriendly peers, etc, will never see it.</p>
<p>3) A teenage boy who did a spoof on the MTV show “Cribs,” he filmed his house inside and out, then posted it on Youtube with a closing shot that said, “Produced by” his real first and last name, and his real town & state.</p>
<p>4) A 17 year old girl who sent nude photos of herself via text-message to her long-time boyfriend to “cheer him up” after a bad game. It never occurred to her that he might accidentally leave the phone in the locker room, or loan it to a friend, or maybe if they broke up and he was upset with her post them on the internet! </p>
<p>These kids all think they’re too smart to be tricked by an online predator, and if they don’t use their real name or hometown no one can find them. They don’t understand that once you send someone a photo on their phone or post it online ITS OUT OF YOUR HANDS AND YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER IT. IT CAN LIVE ON FOREVER. And this is supposed to be the “internet generation?”</p>
<p>Um…</p>
<p>Those kids are the exception, not the rule. I don’t know of one single person that I know who has done that. Those kids are idiots.</p>
<p>I’ve looked at my kids’ Facebook pages and their friends pages. None of them have posted anything like this stuff. But these stories came from my immediate area, supposedly intellingent suburban kids with involved parents.</p>
<p>Although as one middle school principal told us, “I learned never to ask a middle-schooler ‘What were you thinking?’ because the truth is, they WEREN’T thinking.”</p>
<p>Obviously they really weren’t thinking.</p>
<p>Most of us know not to do that stuff…and those kids also obviously have issues if they have to resort to sending nude pictures of themselves to others. But like I said, they’re the exception. You can’t label all of us oblivious because of 4 kids who made stupid choices.</p>
<p>I think we spent so much time telling kids not to post their last name and hometown, and we thought that would keep them safe. But most kids by nature don’t think very far ahead. It’s the idea that posting/sending something takes control of that thing out of your hands that I don’t think they’re grasping.</p>
<p>Interesting…it’s an old story, but I just had lunch with a friend who hires for a creative agency (which I presumed would be fairly tolerant). He says that twice they’ve been about to hire someone, then checked MySpace, found something considered compromising and decided against hiring the person in question. On the other hand, I think there are times when one can get over-paranoid.</p>
<p>What bothers me a little bit is this generation is used to not having any privacy, so they are not sensitive to government invasions of privacy.</p>
<p>Cameras everywhere, recording everything they do…</p>
<p>Honestly, though…as long as the cameras are not in my home, I don’t have a problem with it because I have nothing to hide.</p>
<p>In fact, if the police knocked on my door right now and wanted to search my house, I’d let them, because again-I HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE.</p>
<p>And as for the whole recording thing…I think the government has better things to do than listen to me tell my friends that I’m going to the big game on Friday night, don’t you? Like I said: most of us don’t worry about it because we’re not hiding anything.</p>
<p>HisGraceFillsMe: The reason for privacy is not because you necessarily have something to hide, but because if privacy is not protected rights violations can get disgusting.</p>
<p>Example: Imagine you’re a prominent political activist who is in the middle of a campaign against police brutality. In the jurisdiction where you live, there are no laws against unreasonable search and seizure. So all of a sudden, police are coming into your home and searching it daily, if not more often, causing you massive inconvenience and a ton of emotion turmoil. That is the danger of having privacy not protected - privacy isn’t protected to help the people who have something to hide, but to ensure that privacy violations can’t be used as a weapon.</p>
<p>I’m not trying to defend illegal search and seizure. I’m just trying to get the point across that most of us aren’t thinking “oh, I don’t want any privacy”. I think any of you with teenagers can attest to that XD (it’s especially hard for me since my parents work from home…I have almost no time to myself). I think it’s more that…well, at least for me: if the police searching my house is going to rule me out of a crime, why not? If listening to phone calls that I make internationally might stop future terrorist attacks, where’s the harm? But I digress, and I don’t want to take away from the original topic of the thread.</p>
<p>Nah, I think the privacy thing is actually a very interesting topic, and insofar as the original topic of this thread is true, but not particularly interesting (yes, we know that kids are often idiots about privacy) we might as well go with it. ;)</p>
<p>The problem I have with privacy and rights violations is that they’re a slippery slope. I know that’s not really a concrete argument, and that in theory anything could be called a slippery slope, but just look at what’s happened over the last few years. Since 9/11, civil liberties have been massively curtailed. The Bush administration instituted a number of restrictions on civil liberty to combat terrorism, which may have been a very good idea. But it didn’t stop there. Almost daily we discover evidence of new violations, and so forth, including illegal wiretapping, attempts to coerce the EU into violating their own privacy laws to aid the US, and so forth. I think the past years have aptly demonstrated why conceding privacy rights is always a bad idea.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s not concrete, but you do make sense.</p>
<p>But to bring in another interesting point: we still have a lot more privacy than some other countries do.</p>
<p>For example: as a part of the Smaller Learning Community that I’m in (PEACE academy: Personal success through Empowerment, Academic achievement, Conflict resolution and Ethics in action), we are required to take (as a part of our government/economics class) International Negotiations senior year. We are assigned a country and have to know everything about a certain area (from Economics to Terrorism to Global Health, etc). Then we do e-mail with other “countries”, and it all culminates in this huge face-to-face meeting. This year my school is Canada…and you would be amazed at the limited freedom citizens of other countries have.</p>
<p>I am in no way saying the US is perfect…I’m just saying I think we need to be thankful of the privacy we do have (not trying to say you’re unthankful, I just wanted to bring up the point).</p>
<p>I think saying an entire generation is oblivious is quite a generalization. Most of us do take safety precautions. The examples cited are really just exceptions, imho. They just acted incredibly stupid.</p>
<p>Well, since I’m from Canada I know precisely what you’re talking about, HGFM.</p>
<p>The difference with Canada is that civil liberties violations often have more to do with protecting the common good by restricting positive liberties (i.e. restrictions on gun ownership, smoking bans, etc.) than privacy restrictions - we generally have stronger privacy rights in Canada. Also, our government is significantly less prone to abuses of power, since there is no executive branch and the country’s elected leader is a member of the legislature, meaning he is fully accountable to all kinds of questions, unlike the President, who as we have all seen can quite easily manipulate laws to make himself much, much less accountable than he should be.</p>
<p>The other notable thing is that Canada is generally - and I say only generally, because our current government in some ways opposes this - moving in the direction of more freedom, and not less, which I can’t say about the current American government. ;)</p>
<p>Oh, I was referring more to other countries in general, not just to Canada. I haven’t done all the research yet…so if I was like horrendously off please don’t be offended!!</p>
<p>I really appreciate your information, it might come in handy later :)</p>
<p>Haha, I’m not offended, and figured you probably weren’t referring specifically to Canada, but your post was a but ambiguous so I decided to be informative. ;)</p>