Is Privacy Overrated?

By Phillip (Age 14, Island School)

Everyone, at least at some point in their lives, has something that they want to keep private and to themselves. It can be something simple like a picture of you and your mom that all your friends will think is lame, or something big like your identity card number or passport number. We try to keep things private and in many cases, those efforts prove to be futile. Technology is evolving, and with it, so are the ways for people to invade our privacy.

Every teen has a Facebook account. Well, every teen that has a computer or has access to one. Facebook has become a big part of our daily lives, and we use it to exchange information like homework, or where we are going for the summer holidays. We also upload photos of ourselves and friends. Many of these photos are accessible even if you are not a friend of the uploader, through your friends. Or, maybe the uploader changed their privacy settings so that everyone can see the photos. But, do we want this to happen? Facebook friends are like a chain. We will have friends who have other friends who are not mutual, and those friends will have friends who are not mutual friends with our friend, and so on. So in the end, our privacy is not just limited to people we know. If you do not protect your information carefully, you can have a 56-year old pervert standing outside your window staring at you while you just sit on your sofa watching some movies, not suspecting anything.

But privacy might seem 'overrated.' Most of us believe that privacy must be protected at all costs, as it also involves our personal safety. But there is actually much more information than we think that we would be willing to share with others, like how many cousins you have, or how many siblings you have, how old your grandparents are.

Not conforming to what everyone else is doing will make us social outcasts, but we have to learn to balance it. Although privacy may be overrated, no one would be willing to share information with strangers, which happens almost every day in our society. Uploading pictures of yourself is fine, but things have a limit. Nowadays a lot of adults also use Facebook, and they could be teachers at your school. Many teens whine about teachers making an unfair decision and let it out by writing about ugly their teacher is on Facebook. But if that teen does not have the right privacy settings, his or her teacher won't be greeted with a hearty hello the next morning.

Protecting your privacy is important, but it is not good to think about protecting your privacy all the time. If you are too caught up with protecting your privacy that you forget about living your life and feel paranoid wherever you go, then that will make your life like a horror game: a horror game where you are being chased by an endless horde of zombies who, no matter how many you defeat, will keep coming at you. It is impossible to live in a society where everything is totally private, and where there aren't at least one or two strangers who know your name.

Many teenagers have parents who have Facebook, or have access to their Facebook accounts. Teenagers start to feel unsafe and feel that their parents have invaded their 'private bubble'. But, teens do not think about how a company might have their ID number or how some old guy in another country halfway around the world may have access to their pictures. It is important to know what the priorities are and set them accordingly.

The modern society is a place where no one can be 100% safe, and since the start of mankind, every community and society has been like that. Privacy is something that should definitely be protected, but only to some extent. If we get so paranoid about protecting our privacy that we block ourselves off from the outside world, what's there to protect your privacy from?