The Search for Privacy, or is it a Lost Cause?

I believe lots of people routinely still shred documents before dumping them...offices do it routinely of course..

We have heard a lot these days about surveillance and being electronically monitored to such a degree that it seems like all attempts to safeguard some sense of privacy are sort of in vain...not that people will not keep trying to keep as much of their privacy as they can.

I know that people can demand that Google take pix of their houses off Google Street views..

Google Street Views caused a sensation in this one town in Northern England some years back...when the local people heard the Google camera car was coming, they were just about ready to barricade the road and greet it as an angry mob with pitchforks, etc.

Typical comments were--from an older woman--"They are going to take pictures of me undressed through my window,"--and from one man " They are going to show me drunk  on the street."

I was rather amused these people were so sure they were going to be captured this way..

I have been perusing the internet for views about this and some of them seem less hysterical than others...as one site says

Is There A Right to Privacy?

• The Constitution does not explicitly guarantee any "right to privacy"
• Over time, however, courts have established some privacy rights
• Three legal bases for privacy rights: privacy torts, explicit guarantees of aspects of privacy, and implicit guarantees of broader privacy rights

We all claim it; we all assume that it is one of the rights we possess as Americans. But the right to privacy is more difficult to define, and less explicitly protected than other rights guaranteed to us. The word "privacy" does not even appear in the Constitution, leading some legal scholars to deny that a Constitutional right to it exists. But before we look at that argument, let's examine the current legal bases of our right to privacy. These can be divided into three categories: privacy torts, the explicit guarantees of certain aspects of privacy in the Bill of Rights, and the broader privacy rights implied by the Bill of Rights and further protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

You can read more about legal underpinnings at their website

http://www.shmoop.com/right-to-privacy/is-there-a-right-to-privacy.html

Of course, the government denies there is any great danger. Obama just announced again that there was no serious threat...

It seems to me that most people ( including myself) feel that we are DRIFTING into a state where it all becomes "policy" and what will happen to our right to privacy just will depend on the whims of whomever is in power at the time...

In most of the world, people have not taken their right to privacy as being something that is going to be respected anyway..(except of course for that town in the North of England).