Privacy

America was founded on the idea that individuals have a right to privacy.  In fact, there are four different constitutional amendments that reinforce this right in different ways.  For instance, the First Amendment protects the privacy of beliefs, the Third Amendment supports the privacy of an individual’s home and protects it from being used to house soldiers.  The Fourth Amendment uphold this notion of privacy by protecting individual’s property and bodies against unreasonable searches.  The Fifth Amendment protects the privacy of an individual’s personal information because it protects against self-incrimination.  As you can see, “Our notions of privacy and security are deeply tied to our society and historical notions of person and place” (Reed).

New media is a recent development so there is no specific amendment protecting people’s privacy in media but I can imagine that these can fall in one of the aforementioned amendments.  The problem with privacy in new media is that there is none.  The digital cloud or ether is not a house door that you can be closed and locked.  Even with privacy settings, it can ultimately be accessed by inquisitive people.  There is nothing intimate or private about new media despite the what privacy settings want you to believe.  Your information is either being outsourced to an advertising agency or watched by hackers.  New media actually makes you vulnerable to outside intruders.  The truth is that a lot of people live their lives through the internet.  Positive and negative aspects of their lives are logged indefinitely.  The constitutional right to privacy that everyone professes through the amendments is compromised because information is exposed to everyone.  Advertisers are notorious for using people’s personal information to market products to them.  This is an invasion of privacy, but in digital space where the lines are blurred, what is actually private.