When Dr Ethan Plaut spoke to us a few weeks ago, one particular point seemed to alarm the majority of the class. We know in the abstract that our data, be it our internet history, Facebook photos, or even our location, is collected and accessed by mega-corporations. But for some reason, the idea of our food shopping being tracked (with the example of the Onecard) made us collectively gasp.
I thought it was interesting that for some reason, this seems like a much more personal intrusion than the monitoring of our Google searches, or other more commonly mentioned forms of data tracking. We tend to accept that anything that we put on social media is there forever, and can generally be seen by anyone. However, it’s almost offensive to us that our real-life activity (as opposed to online activity) might also be tracked, even though the mechanism by which it is done is something we volunteer for.
So why is it that we care more about this particular lack of privacy? Perhaps because it has been ingrained in us since we were born that our online lives are not our own, we are blasé in that situation. On the other hand, we like to maintain a feeling of independence in the real world, so it unsettles us to think that even that part of lives might be monitored and recorded.
In the end, we probably won’t change our habits despite this awareness, but it is interesting that we have such strong preconceptions of how much privacy we are owed in each different facet of our lives.
