Privacy In Our Lives

Privacy throughout many parts of our lives seems to be a thing of the past. There was a day when the concept of someone reading your emails was every bit as ludicrous as someone reading the letters you got from Grandma on Christmas.

Unfortunately, the wording on that included the word “WAS”. Online privacy seems to be growing more and more scarce as time goes on, and some researchers are wondering if that trend will continue into the future.

The antics of Big Brother aren’t just necessarily confined to the Room 101 of Orwell’s greatest written work. Surveillance as part of everyday life or as a tool of the state or corporate world is constantly being updated, and that means the personal details of our lives are constantly under barrage for little to no reason.

So we wonder, if we worry more about our privacy today than we did 10 or 20 years ago, what does it look like 10 or 20 years down the road.

The researchers at Pew Research Center put together a survey recently that aimed to answer that question. You can view the article here (Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era).

“The Future of Privacy” survey was done among 2,500 experts, asking them for their forecast on what legal status our own personal privacy may have in the future.

Survey topics included the following:

“Will policy makers and technology innovators create a secure, popularly accepted, and trusted privacy-rights infrastructure by 2025 that allows for business innovation and monetization while also offering individuals choices for protecting their personal information in easy-to-use formats?”

“Describe what you think the reality will be in 2025 when it comes to the overall public perception about whether policy makers and corporations have struck the right balance between personal privacy, secure data, and compelling content and apps that emerge from consumer tracking and analytics.”

“Consider the future of privacy in a broader social context. How will public norms about privacy be different in 2025 from the way they are now?”

Through it all, a majority of respondents answers leaned toward the notion that privacy is getting chipped away slowly, and that governments and corporations do not have much incentive to self-regulate when it comes to keeping John Q Citizen’s personal data as private as it was a decade ago.

Unfortunately, the study pointed to a future that was less about hover boards and more about living constantly in the public eye whether private citizens wanted to or not.

Future of Digital Privacy

That’s important to remember as new legislation is proposed and bills are signed into law. If governments and corporations aren’t going to look out for our interests, than we have to. A great way to protect your privacy online is by using a trusted VPN provider. If you don’t want to join our service we are OK with that, but please do use a VPN of some sort to protect your digital privacy.