Tech Answers

The American Library Association’s Choose Privacy Week was May 1-7.  Oops—dropped the ball on that one.  Still, one of the key points of Choose Privacy Week is that privacy awareness is something we all have to take seriously all the time, particularly online. A common mistake when considering privacy is assuming that it is something we possess naturally and have taken away from us by others. The reality is that privacy is something we have to actively claim for ourselves and work for every day. Our electronic world does not allow for anything less.  People become understandably indignant when their sense of privacy is violated. I’m not trying to blame the victim—indeed, the potential victims are any or all of us. Nevertheless, we need to recognize that today’s world of hyper-connectivity and big data doesn’t allow us the luxury of treating privacy as a given.  

First, let’s get real about privacy:

You’ve probably encountered them - big flashing warning boxes on websites that inform you that your computer is infected with hundreds of viruses or malware or some such.  Scary, right?  You don’t want your computer to be infected with anything!  And these nice people are offering to scan your computer to clean it with their free download - how thoughtful!  So you click yes, please clean my computer, and it all goes downhill from there.