We live in pretty interesting times. The people's views have changed quite dramatically. What was a big "no-no" only decades ago is today's "sure,why not". The phrase: "Only in America" comes to mind. Medicinal drugs (marijuana) are now legal in certain states and so is the homosexual union. Certain rights are not permitted on the federal level, but state citizens still choose to pursue them anyway.
The IT sector had a major influence on many of these cultural shifts. Electronic storage and data extraction from huge depositories of information facilitated many tedious tasks. I can't imagine how hard it must have been in the past to find the right document in those mountains of paper. Imagine using a ladder to get to the right shelf? Now, the desired information is only several clicks away. It is also more secure in a physical sense. A natural disaster no longer threatens the integrity of the documents. Files are backed up on servers which are located in different places.
These advantages can also be major disadvantages. Hackers might attempt to break into these archives from the comfort of their own home. Even the latest firewalls and anti-viruses cannot guarantee that information will not leak. It doesn't mean that bad guys should dictate how we access and store the information either. Database access is still very convenient even for regular people like you and me. Phone number lookup is a good example of how freedom of information can help people.
It allows a person to run a simple reverse telephone number lookup and find out who the owner of a telephone number is. Potential benefits of this service are amazing. For example 800 reverse phone lookup services allow a person to find out the name of the organization that called. Or a person can run a reverse cell phone lookup to find out who is harassing him or her over the phone.
Unfortunately this innocent service can be used in a bad way. A person who is using reverse telephone lookup might be a stalker too. He might be looking up information about a person who is not returning his phone calls. But where do we draw the line? This is a perverted mix of freedom of information and potential for privacy violation.
I think that every person should have a say in this matter. If we don't have our say, our privacy might be taken away bit by bit. Imagine waking up one day to a world where privacy is a secondary notion. And when that stage is reached, it's often a done deal which is hard to reverse. Even the smallest representatives (on the municipal level) should be listened to at the highest of levels in order to prevent this from happening, because your privacy does matter.
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