Computers and Privacy

Question #13:

What do you think is the most worrisome threat to privacy in our technological age? (Focus on a specific example).

It is very difficult to pin point the most worrisome threat to privacy in our technological age because there are various threats that are worrisome indeed. In order to focus on a specific example, and for the purpose of this assignment, I would think that the most worrisome threat is the use of modern and sophisticated monitoring devices and computerized record keeping and record processing procedures. In other words, clandestine surveillance of individuals by government and its various agencies could be regarded as the most worrisome threats to privacy in our technological age.

On their own, these various technologies should not have been any threat to anybody, but they rather make it easier for government and its agencies as well as some private individuals and organizations to invade the privacy of other individuals, by placing them on secret surveillance without their consent and even at times without their knowledge. These surveillance activities are all embracing: monitoring individual movements, phone calls conversations, finances, social life, academic life, medical records, driving records, assets, liabilities, religious activities etc. When one is under surveillance, his entire family is affected. No wonder Kant stressed that the value of a person is an end in itself, and that persons should never be used as means, and that constant surveillance diminishes one’s personhood. He said the world is no longer as one think it is, but rather a mini-world under the microscope of some larger world. Kant said that one become a means to some other end – that of governmental power or corporate profit. Even if one do not even know he is being observed, the value of what one hold in high regard is diminished and if one realized that he is being observed, this affects one actions and one is no long autonomous.

A major international privacy report published recently has concluded that governments across the word have substantially increased surveillance in the past years, specially since after 911 incidents in the US. The report wards that threats to personal privacy have reached a level that is dangerous to fundamental human rights. Besides, there is the potential of inaccurate information being spread around about a person or even accurate information that is not somebody else’s concern.

There is an increasing demand of information that could be found in government records, and information gathered through surveillance could be sold to another country or any third party to get extra revenue, no one can tell. It is true that privacy is becoming harder to maintain, and surveillance is being more pervasive, and unless some drastic and urgent action is taken, especially by privacy international, a human rights group formed as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations, the worrisome threats will persist.




Question #14:

What should b done to protect privacy? Make one concrete suggestion that would help protect privacy today (you may focus on something specific like privacy on the Internet, or perhaps make a more general suggestion.

It is a well-known fact that that the Internet is very important and useful as a network, but at the same time very easy for one to give away a lot of information about oneself, no matter how careful we might think we are. It is also important to know that the Internet is internationally and largely unregulated. This means that laws of any country do not usually apply to another country on the activities of Internet network. The office of the Privacy Commissioner said that if one suffers a privacy invasion via the Internet, it would only be able to help if the matter involved an organization subjects to the privacy Act. Information could be collected in the Internet through cookies, HTTP, browsers, downloading of free software, search engines, electronic commerce, emails, Spam, chatting etc.

In view of the above, one concrete suggestion that would help protect privacy today is for the individual users of Internet to limit the amount of private information they share on the Internet. To be more specific, efforts should be made on the following areas to ensure adequate privacy protection:

SPAM: There are big anti-Spam movements nowadays and I think there should be a global Spam Act to prevent unsolicited commercial electric messages. The span Act has been enforced in so many countries and it will work if enforced globally. The government, schools, and families should embark upon awareness of the dangers involved so that the ignorant individuals will limit the amount of information they share online, especially through emails and mailing lists. Individuals could set the computer to delete the cookies file whenever one starts a browser. Cookies crusher or pal could be used to reject or manage cookies. The current use of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is desirable, because it provides protection during transmission of credits cards numbers.

Majority of what to do to protect individual privacy on the Internet rest on individual because it will be difficult for government to implement any law regarding privacy protect on the Internet. We should not give too much private information out on the Internet.

Heidegger's Questioning concerning technology

Question #11

One particular learning experience that stand out to me from what I learnt from the website on Heidegger is his views as the danger associated with technology. He begins by say that he was questioning concerning technology in order to bring to light our relationship to its essence.” He said it is not enough to identify Enframing as the essence of modern technology, but that we need to determine how we, as human beings, stand in relation to technology. He suggested how humanity might come into the “free relationship to technology”. which is, remember the aim of his essay. He said because enframing does not utterly change humanity’s connection to the world, there is room, even within enframing, for different—we might say “renewed” orientation to the world. Once we realize that our own orientation to the world is the essence of technology, once we open ourselves, we will find an opportunity to establish a free relationship to technology. He emphasize the fact that humanity can come to realize that it, too, is ”on its way” to an arrival, and that only by reorienting itself to the way in which nature reveals itself can humanity establish a relationship with the world that is not ultimately self-destructive. Heidegger views as the danger associated with technology is not so much the direct effects of mechanization, but that humanity will eventually reach a point at which the human will become only so much “standing-reserve” if he continues on the path of enframing. He also said humanity over inflated sense of its power over the natural world might led to his believe that he has control over all existence, and that excessive pride leads to “delusion”. He concluded by say that such an orientation to thee world will blind humanity to the ways in which the word revels itself. This discussion by Heidegger is a food for thought for me after reading it. I now have a different view of what technology is all about, and in short his essay has re-enforce my re-orientation and thinking about technology since the beginning of this course.

Question #12

Enframing:

Enframing is one of the concepts in Heidegger’s essay, the question concerning technology. Enframing is the essence of technology, which “means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve”. Enframing tends to rule out other ways of revealing and meanings that do not fit the egocentric use of resources. Human beings begin to see themselves in the same way as they view other resources. Heidegger uses the term enframing as a challenging claim on man. Once things have been revealed to us we place them inside of a “frame” of understanding. Example is what a picture frame does to an image. Not only does the image now have a place inside the frame, but also we can call it a picture because of the frame, which it has around it. Heidegger wants us to know that we cannot neglect the surroundings, no matter how small they may appear to us at the time. He believes that modern technology, as Enframing is dangerous, that if we enframe we are losing sight of our revealing and our essence. He said our essence is concealed from us because we become users of the world as standing-reserve. “Enframing, Heidegger said is a danger that sets man on a destructive and self-destructive course, because it blocks every view into the coming-to-pass of revealing and so endangers the relation to the essence of truth”. On a second taught, enframing could makes clear the responsibility of human beings to the world if we reflect upon the it as the essence of technology, and then we find not only that we are a part of the world, but that the world needs us to care for it”.

Discussion on Jonas's Technology and Responsibility

Question #9:

Pick a passage in Hans Jonas’s paper that you find interesting. Write down the first sentence and the page number, and then say why you picked it.

I found passage I through II most interesting in Jonas’s paper. Passage 1 says, “The novel powers I have in mind are, of course those of modern technology. My first point, accordingly, is to ask how this technology affects the nature of our acting, in what ways it makes acting under its dominion different from what it has been through the ages”. (Page 120).

I picked this passage because of the meticulous way in which Jonas highlighted and discusses the characteristics of human actions, which he said are relevant for a comparison with the state of things today. He discusses all dealings of man with non-human world as ethical neutral without ethical significant, as ethical significant he said, belongs to the direct dealing of man with man. In other words, all the traditional ethic is human centered. Ethic then was of the present as occasions warrants. He talks of ethic as being base on “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, “Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you”, “Instruct your child in the way of truth’, etc. Jonas is categorically saying that all these has changed as modern technology has brought actions of novel scale, object and consequences that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them. The wondrous power of man has changed, the neighbor ethics of justice, love and honesty has been beclouded by modern technology’s responsibility.

Questions # 10:

Jonas argues that we need a ‘new ethics of long-range responsibility’. Do you think we would need to change the way we think to live up to this idea?

I think Jonas is absolutely right in this direction. This is a worthwhile idea and I think that for us to live up to this idea, we need to change the way we think. Jonas said that technological power has turned what used and out to be tentative, perhaps enlightening, plays of speculative reason into competing blueprints for projects, and in choosing between them we have to choose between extremes of remote effects. He had earlier said that the nature of human action has changed, and since ethics is concerned with action, it should follow that the changed nature of human action calls for a change in ethics as well. Therefore we should not be concerned only with the present; rather the future should be represented. Politics should go beyond self-interest. Government should have sufficient representation to meet the new demands on its normal principles and by its normal mechanics. For this to be achieved calls for change in the way we think. We should be thinking about the future and the effects of the ever-increasing nature of human action.