I moan the passing of privacy. Privacy as we know it in the past has now been stripped off us. No one can say they have absolute privacy in this digital era and age. The internet especially has rendered privacy a gone dream and yet this is one of the most important things in life.

Everyone needs some form of privacy not because they have something to hide but because one feels that there are certain aspects of one’s life that shouldn’t be public knowledge. If one wanted to make their lives public knowledge then one would simply put out an advert of it on TV.

Can you imagine a camera documenting the way you scratch your sitting facility. This is possible in case where hidden security cameras document a person’s moves in public especially in shopping centres.

In this era, privacy is a dream that we have all lost. The use of the internet and other media has made privacy a relic of the past. In a matter of minutes and a click of a few buttons, someone can establish another person’s history and even current location and other details from the internet.

A person’s bank records, criminal records, education and health records can be acquired in a matter of seconds from any part of the world. The craze has gone as far as people hacking into other people’s email accounts to get information. It doesn’t matter how many soft wares are produced to guard a person’s personal files another is developed to break into it.

Sarah Plain the Republican Vice- presidential candidate in the recently concluded USA election made headline news when contents of her yahoo email account were published for all to see. She also made more headline news when she had a conversation with some one masquerading to be the French president.

If someone can be able to hack into Sarah Palin’s account and trick her into a conversation, what about the average citizen of the internet and the World Wide Web?

Someone once sent me an email welcoming me to the invasion of my privacy, which scared me from the internet for a few minutes but not long. It is impossible to live without internet these days.

Of course, there are people in this country who want to insist on traditional means of communication but they are not safe in addition, since somewhere someone has information on them. It could be the bank, the hospital or a school.

There is no escaping from this invasion of privacy. The above shows cases where the victims have no choice in releasing private information but there is another category of people who freely exchange private information through the internet without caring about how this will be used against them in future.

There is a new set of internet citizens that spend all their time chatting away and revealing intimate secrets to friends and sometimes strangers as in the case of chat rooms. The internet chat rooms give a person a false sense of freedom to talk, chat and expose details about themselves, after all one doesn’t expect to ever meet the person on the other end of the line.

However, some of these people end up attracting stalkers, thieves and murderer’s into their lives. A person can tell you they are in London while they are chatting you from the next-door cafe or across the road.

There is another form of exposing one’s privacy knowingly or unknowingly through the social networking facilities like Face book, plaxo pulse, Hi Five, and other social utilities on the internet where people freely exchange information, pictures and other details in a circle of friends.

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