Nowadays, it is very difficult to hide our privacy. If you go somewhere with someone, he/she will post photos, videos of you or location information together with your SNS account. Even if your information isn’t open by your friends or yourself, this means you are silent online, which has meanings. For instance, as my experience of graduation of university of school of law, silence is enough to construct a crime of fraud in Japan. Even though it cannot construct the crime, your friends can guess you are bored and busy through your silence. Like this, silence is also a type of information because there will be much more information anywhere, silence is unusual.
Keeping a secret is a really heavy job. As you know, NSA failed that job, even though NSA declined that failure the first time it was revealed on June 5th. 1(They are collecting our information online.) The first time of disclosure is done by the article of Guardian. They posted a copy of order which FISC ordered information of Verizon metadata. [1] Edward Snowden who is a whistleblower declare himself on June 9th. [2] Of course, there are many reaction for this snooping. Some people are trying to protect their information from Prism program. The Government justify their action by giving an example of how they protect America by using american people’s information. [3] Many article, movement and opinion will still occur about this snooping.
I’m interested in a different point of view. Can’t we have the ability to keep a secret in this age anymore? As I said before, it is difficult to hide an information. Recently, there are many affair of this kind. First, appearance of Wikileaks is so famous. Second, in Japan, there is a leak of video which Japan Coast Guard took for recording for Senkaku boat collision incident. [4] Finally, one of my friend broke up with his girlfriend because she saw his facebook message and found out that he was going out with another girl. Of course, we are welcome to be able to know secret which we should know. However, how about our privacy? Is having a perfect privacy still attainable in this age? My answer for that would be a no. So, we should learn how to express ourselves more and we should get used to be disclosed our information by other people. It is a probability to change old privacy concept into a new concept. We should admit that our old privacy is gone and start to accept the possibility that anyone can access our information.
Why should we accept the new idea of allowing anyone to be able to access our information? It is because we can get great benefits from it. In fact, some people are already getting its advantage. That is why it’s better to follow this trend if you want to be competitive to people who frequently update their information. For example, a company will hire a person who they can see his/her information from online than person who is hiding his/her information online. It’s better to open their code on Github for programmer. Also, we are getting a great benefit from open information project like wikipedia. Expressing yourself gives us many opportunities. People are forced to present themselves online. Otherwise, we will lose.
To determine the boundary between privacy and public matter is also a new problem in this age. A root of right to privacy is from America. U.S. supreme court said that we should protect two different kind of interests. “One is the individual interest in avoiding disclosure of personal matters and another is the interest in independence in making certain kinds of important decisions. “ [5] This statement affects some country’s law like Japan. The land of of liberty. Can government have the liberty to snoop their resident’s information for the sake of prevention for terrorism? We should recall the statement and redefine our privacy.
