Facebook, Welcome to Our New Orwellian Society.

Big Brother Is Watching!

There was a time when most people who were concerned with “Big Brother” and the mass quantities of information that the government had obtained on us, were considered crazy. We didn’t take those people seriously when they claimed that Hoover’s men had dossiers on every citizen in the country, and we laughed at those who donned their tin foil hats and foretold of a future the likes of which were predicted in George Orwell’s book 1984. And yet today, those in the tin foil hats are laughing at us as we, in the name of freedom, security and privacy give our information readily to anyone who may or may not ask for it.

           When it comes to individual privacy, there are two main concerns. There is the ease and almost immediateness at which one can gain access to an individual’s information, and the bigger threat, the ease and immediateness at which we, the individuals, give up this information. And our rapidly changing and ever precious technology lies right at the center of all of this. Forty years ago, privacy scams were mostly telephone scams and a stolen wallet, but they have evolved over the years. From the telephone scams, to credit card fraud, and then to the complete and total takeover of your identity, our fears have risen exponentially, or they should have.

It is scary how much information you can find out about a person just by typing their name into Google. It almost eliminates the need for background checks anymore. Employers now use the internet to seek damaging information on future employees, and it is all there right at their fingertips. And they didn’t even have to pay that pesky $30 handling fee. Actually, there is very little that we can’t find out about someone from the internet these days.

Most people know better by now than to give information over the telephone. The likelihood of a reputable company soliciting much over the telephone is slim to none. We know better than to open unknown emails and we certainly don’t give out our social security number or our mother’s maiden name. And we absolutely don’t give both at the same time. How stupid are we? Well, we are still pretty stupid. We still fill out forms every day at the stores giving up our name and address, favorite color and our phone numbers. This is then usually accompanied by or purchase on a credit or debit card. We sign up for contest, this requires more information than we’d like, but we’d really like that free vacation to Bali. Then we allow our phone to check us in on Facebook whenever we go somewhere. This way, the whole world knows where we are at any second. And if our phone doesn’t check us in, many stores will now offer a discount to those who check themselves in, thus prompting us to give up yet more of our privacy.

So maybe the men in the tin foil hats were wrong. The government doesn’t have secret dossiers on all of us. Or maybe they were closer to the truth than we ever imagined. Instead of secretly collecting information on all of us, they have found a way to get us to willingly provide them with any and all information they may need at the drop of the hat. And they did this by manipulating a young Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. Ah, Facebook, the gateway into our new Orwellian Society. Welcome to 1984.


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