Privacy In The Information Age :: essays research papers

The world is changing rapidly. There utilise to be a time when we could be confident that no matchless could learn too much about our personal lives. There use to be a time when learning was merely a fashion of keeping records. That time is gone and with it went a large amount of what we talent call our personal privacy. knowledge about our personal lives has now aim one of the most valued resources on the market today. The explosion of the information processing dodging and communications industries has created a system that can store vast amounts of data on an individual and transmit that information almost anywhere in a negligible amount of time. More and more people be gaining ingress to this information and the government has been too slow to react to the changes. As a result, employers, insurance agencies, law enforcement officers, and researchers are all lobbying for legislation that would assemble clear rules for the access to this information. Each of these gro ups stand to gain enormous benefits from legitimizing access to a broad base of personal information. This information go forth be organized into vast databases that will be maintained by the government, quote report agencies, the health care industry, and employers. The system will come to entertain information on virtually every aspect of our lives, the data will be quickly and efficiently transferred around the globe via the arising Global Information Infrastructure, and paper records sitting in file cabinets will become a thing of the past. However, considering current trends, what may be missed the most from the venerable system are the locks on those old, rusted file cabinets. This new system allows for a lot of access to previously confidential files and we are already seeing the negative effects that this system has produced. For example, employers and insurance companies have begun to tell apart against individuals base on samplings of a persons or foetuss DNA. As gen etic testing and the human genome project advance, at that place will be an even greater opportunity for discrimination based on characteristics or conditions that may, or may not, arise in an individuals future. To deliver the goods a background to the discussion, this report will establish who has access to what information today.