The end of privacy

I’m amazed at how the media is plunging into all the hacked Sony stuff without ever mentioning the right to privacy. What a quaint thing that was. I keep reading and hearing these Sony emails in the press as if they were public property and thinking when are we next? Apparently anything ever written on a computer keyboard is now considered fair game. And that means you and me, not just big corporations or government employees. It’s a stunning shift in attitudes toward privacy. People apparently have the right to peer into and publicize whatever we write in a digital format. You send an email, it’s public property. Where does this stop? Are phone conversations next? This is completely creeping me out. The vicious thugs who run North Korea get pissed at a movie that makes fun of them and splatter the studio responsible’s information all over the web, right down to individual employee’s  social security numbers. Reporters, bloggers and the public go nuts publicizing it, without compunction. Somehow hacking is no longer a crime, and our very thoughts are now public property, WikiLeaks expanded ad infinitum. There’s no limit. And this isn’t 1984, it wasn’t the government that did this, or big corporations, or any mega anything. It was the people. Just people. The North Koreans realized this, and used our own creepiness to spread the information. They understood that deep down we’re basically people peeking into other people’s windows. All they had to do was dump all the info they stole onto public sites and watch the rats race to feed on it.  We’re the ones who are so ravenous for all these intimate details. We’re the ones who crave other people’s secret thoughts. We’re the ones who love the dirt. We flushed our own right to privacy down the toilet. We created this nightmare. Though almost none of you see it as a nightmare. But this is just beginning, people. Any of you could find yourself gone viral, and have no control over it, even as it destroys your life. This will happen more and more and more. Now that we’ve given away our right to privacy, we don’t even have the right to complain. This is a brand new world and I, for one, don’t like it at all.

You might laugh now, think this is just paranoia, but when it’s your photo-shopped fake sex offender mugshot registering a couple million hits a day, you’ll remember the old days.