The Importance Of Online Privacy

While in a perfect world, no one would need to bother a fig's worth for specifically protecting their privacy on the internet from intrusion, we live in a less than perfect world. In the world as it stands, we endure unjust and unwieldy legislation that mandates that all e-mails and web site visits are recorded for a period of two years at a time no matter who the users involved are! When things like this happen, you need to take extra steps to protect yourself, or at the very least protest.

The government of the United Kingdom wants to take this further still, and store all this collected info on a centralized database that can be accessed by various entities. So... do you trust your government to efficiently and safely store all this information, and then allow only people who wouldn't abuse it to have access to it?

Is it wrong to not want to be basically stalked by an impersonal and bureaucratic government? True, maybe we have nothing to hide. Maybe we have no illegal substances in our homes, for example. Does that mean we should consent to having our houses searched every week? Of course not. Ordinary citizens shouldn't be monitored constantly just to try and catch a negligible amount of careless criminals in the process. It's not right, and it's not even an effective way to catch crooks. How much real freedom do we have to give up for the illusion of safety?

And once the information has been stored, you need to contend with who else could be trying to make use of it. Who would want all this personal information? Why, the very criminals the government is trying to protect you from, of course. Everything from identity theft to fraud and much more can be enabled indirectly by these information-gathering procedures.

It's human nature to let our government get away with what it can, and that means the gradual erosion of our rights and whatever information we used to consider private. We shouldn't embrace this kind of change, but recognize it as an invasion of our personal being and fight it with all our might to retain a sense of individual safety and security. Should everyone who enjoys looking at legal pornography, for example, be forced to tell the world about it, when they've never engaged in so much as jaywalking or any other criminal behavior?

It's important to retain a firm grip on our freedoms because those are the things modern goverment and society are founded on. Certainly, illegal activities on the internet should be hunted down and burnt out of existence with all due zeal, but that doesn't have to mean violating the rights of whole massive populations on the off chance of maybe catching one of the bad guys with a lot of luck. Identity thieves specifically already consider such data a rich, juicy target, and databases are really monitored by the heavy amount of security they should be. Even having it dispersed through local ISPs, unsafe as it is, is better than taking all that vital information and centralizing it in one location under the government, where a single break in can be absolutely disastrous. Think about the potential risks and consequences of these kinds of laws, and consider letting your local legal representatives know what you feel about it all.