Is privacy a thing of the past?

It’s certainly a thing of the past if you live online.

Yes, no doubt about it, but the illusion is still there for some of the older generations.

I was talking to someone and mentioned they pass seven camera’s on the way to my house and I’m in rural Missouri. Imagine what cities are like as far as privacy.

ATM’s, camera’s at stoplights, DOT camera’s, private in-store camera’s, phones/ GPS, it’s all over and done with at this point I believe.

Good answer @knowitall. And I agree with you. What I don’t understand is how anyone in this day and age can be kidnapped and no one sees a thing!

@chyna Not everyone is deluded about privacy and I’m sure they LOOK for camera’s.

Privacy was done long before the Internet. As long as humans have relationships, privacy is virtually nonexistent. Ted Kaczynski lived about as far off the grid as anyone could.

@canidmajor Correct.

Another interesting factoid (since we’ve all been discussing violence): In 1958, at the age of 16, Kaczynski entered Harvard University on a scholarship. There, he studied mathematics and was part of a psychological experiment conducted by professor Henry A. Murray, in which participants were subjected to extensive verbal abuse. This experiment, too, is thought to have been a factor in Kaczynski’s later activities.

But it seems all levels of privacy are now a thing of the past,we don’t seem to care, should we care?
As long as the powers that be say it’s in the name of safety we just allow it.
Everything we buy is tracked back to us so we can be the focus of advertising .

You can still avoid having most of your purchases tracked. As long as you can pay cash and somewhat disguise yourself from cameras, and rotate your stores and stuff, you won’t be tracked for advertising.

Don’t ever use the internet, and don’t use businesses that do. You don’t have to allow it.

The rest of us poor, stupid, slobs will just ignore your warnings and be led off, while looking at our cell phones, holding the hands of those horrid children we shouldn’t have had, into some exclusively consumerist future. :-)

^^ And driving our cars with all those awful bells and whistles…..Too bad we didn’t live in simpler times like the Middle Ages!

“Is privacy a thing of the past?”
No.

“Any government can find out how many times you scratch your butt a day.”
Not my butt they can’t.
You exaggerate.

“Everything on line can be found out through one way or the other.”
What?
No.
Not everything is online.
The things that are online are often not accurate.

“Most purchases can be tracked.”
Which is nasty and should be stopped.

“Is real privacy a thing of the past, do we care that we are losing it?”
What’s “real privacy”?
It’s possible to be off the grid.
It’s especially possible to add inaccurate noise to what is online about yourself.
However, there are far more intrusions than there used to be, and more than there should be, and yes many people care about it.

SQUEEKY2’s avatar

“But it seems all levels of privacy are now a thing of the past,”
It does? How so?

“we don’t seem to care, should we care?”
Some do and some don’t. Yes, enough people should care that the bad abuses can be corrected.

“As long as the powers that be say it’s in the name of safety we just allow it.”
That’s one of the nasty tricks used, yes. Count me out of your ”we just allow it” though, and think about how you can count yourself out, too.

“Everything we buy is tracked back to us so we can be the focus of advertising .”
Which is nasty, but resistible. Send me a private message and we could arrange to trade store loyalty cards. Most of mine are under no name, fake names, someone else’s name, etc.

I started working in Aerospace and Defense in 1965.

From the get-go I was told, “Assume all phone conversations are being monitored.”
*

We were handling confidential, secret and some people top secret items.

I remember getting a call from someone in sales for military items, “Please pull all paperwork for a Purchase Order # – - – . And send them to me by overnight courier.” Apparently he called everyone that touched or handled that Purchase Order inside an outside the company.” I never found out why and we did business for the next ten years. I assumed it was a “black contract” which was not to go through production order systems.

For the most part.