A Question of Privacy

Privacy is a much-touted concept, an intangible property we all feel we have a right to own. But is it really that important? How much privacy can we really expect, in a world where more and more of our lives take place online? How much do we really care?

Right now, I know that an ex-boyfriend has two pit bulls, a gun collection, and a baby boy on the way. I haven’t talked to him in over ten years. Another ex- is now a professional skateboarder, living in Paris. My husband, being a tech geek, is literally everywhere in the online world — a Google search on his favourite username turns up more results than I have the patience to visit, leaving me thanking my lucky stars that I am not one of those people who feel compelled to check up on the activities of my spouse.

We all like to think we have an inherent right to privacy, we fight for it, we obsess about it. When we venture into online communities, we may assume false names, even false images to represent ourselves…but do they grant us the assurance of anonymity that we believe they do?

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In Favor of Sheltering

The standard American parenting advice is directed toward one specific end: get your kids as independent as possible, as fast as possible. Let them cry it out, schedule their feedings, put them in preschool as soon as possible. Once in school, the rush begins to inundate them with as much “knowledge” as we possibly can, with emphasis put on making good grades and conforming to a specific mode of “acceptable behaviour”. The question which begs to be asked is whether all of this is actually creating the desired end result: healthy, happy, competent adults who can interact with society in a useful (or at least, not harmful) way?

We all live in society, of course, and interact with the products of this system on a regular basis. Most of us, in fact, are products of it ourselves. We should be able to answer this question from our subjective experience, but as we have allowed ourselves to become a culture reliant on “official results”, let us take a moment and examine what the statistics say about how our society is shaping up.

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