Ensuring Your Privacy
"Privacy. There seems to be no legal issue today that cuts so wide a swath through conflicts
confronting American society. From AIDS tests to wiretaps, polygraph tests to computerized
data bases, the common denominator has been whether the right to privacy outweighs other
Robert Ellis Smith, the Privacy Journal
Computers have been a very instrumental technology that has greatly advanced the
ways in which we now do things such as; business, daily activities, shopping,
scheduling appointments, and many other things. And with more and more people using
the Internet, more and more information being passed over the Internet, more problems
arise. The Internet has been an advance in technology that has greatly increased the
capacities of a computer. These new capacities have been the cause of some serious
problems though. One very important trouble is the lack of privacy on the Internet.
People pass much important information over the Internet and they expect it to be safe
from others. Information passed over the Internet can in fact be intercepted and read by
other people. For many years, this has been happening, and it has always been a
problem, but with more and more information being passed through, people want
something to ensure their privacy. The government does not want to allow everyday
people the privelage of computer security. Although they have tried to place laws on
the uses of some methods of privacy, they have not been as successful as they had
hoped. Privacy is important to people, governments and businesses, and finding a
method to protect their information is also a concern.
Privacy has been defined as "the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to
determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is
communicated to other...