Throughout my admittedly short life, I have learned the importance of locked doors and the privacy that they ensure. As a child, even if I was terrified of the prospect of the boogeyman I swore lived under my bed, I had to knock—to ask permission—to enter my parent’s private space so I could be reassured that my room was a bogeyman free zone. I was barred from private conversations, told to keep my mean thoughts private, and I was introduced to basic anatomy through the idea of private parts. As a society, there is a great amount of importance placed upon the idea of privacy. Privacy is the notion of being alone or secretive in manner. In the classical sense, locking doors and being a singular …show more content…
Diane Russell, Maine’s State Representative, writes in her article, “The Virtual Big Brother”, “Since Orwell wrote about "Big Brother" in the book 1984, people from across the political spectrum have had a general agreement that we should be allowed to live our daily lives without being tracked and monitored by the government. Thanks to a dramatic shift in technological innovation, the government can easily track, monitor and surveil its citizens… The nexus of governmental Big Brother and corporate Big Brother have combined to create an environment where we are expected to give up our Constitutional rights when we apply them in a virtual world”. George Orwell in 1948 predicted the discourse of government and humanity because of the loss of personal privacy and advancement in technology in 1984 and the definition of privacy in the 21st century seems like it emerged straight from the warnings of Orwell. While we may not be living in the landscape of Orwell’s imagination just yet, the altered meaning of privacy bears consequences. If a population believes that there is still true privacy, it leads to a misguided sense of safety. As a population that has individuals with mass amounts of critical information stored online and rooted within our technology—there are few threats more relevant than the threats that place that information at