Privacy Is Out The Window

No question about it, many people wonder if their personal privacy is a thing of the past. Just about anywhere you go, someone has a camera, video, or microphone, taking pictures, recording your every move, or recording much of what you say. Interestingly, politicians often seem to be behind the curve on these issues, and they are frequently caught doing or saying things that are later used against them in political ads, or perhaps even to prove things they initially denied. Terrorism, or the threat thereof, motivated governments at national, state and local levels to position cameras around large public gathering places and important bridges, buildings, monuments and the like. With so much hatred in many places around the world, including right here in America, the likelihood of any of these "observation points" going away any time soon, is highly doubtful. And all of the private devices, including camera phones, are not going to go away anytime soon, if ever. So I'd say, "Get used to it."

What many people don't think about is how much of our personal info is available to others, and I mean to members of the public, not necessarily to your local mayor's office. Many folks probably don't realize that, in many states and localities, lots of records about you are a matter of "public record;" that is, anyone can have access to the info. Birth records, death records, and marriage records commonly, but not in all cases, fall into this category. Other records have a "bit" more privacy, but it doesn't take much to get into them. Here I'm talking about such things as your traffic violations, your credit records,* and your payment, or non payment, of certain taxes (often property). In years past, these records were available, too, but few people even knew about it, or if they did, they were usually not interested enough to get off their...ah...duffs, to go to whatever office had the info and look it up. Now, much of that same info is available online; no getting off your duff, no driving to a particular location, no standing in line, and no flipping through file folders. Click, click, click...and there it is!**

Now that the Internet has been in existence for awhile, companies are always collecting info about what websites you visit, and of course, if you buy things online, make payments, or do online banking, you "register" to have access to those accounts, and that means personal info is stored by these outlets, making them vulnerable to "hackers" or just momentary lapses in website security, or flaws in software.

Then there's the personal aspect to our info, and we can't ever get away from it (I guess?). Companies and government officials are always saying, "We don't sell your information or provide it to others." I'm sure many of these "disclaimers" are sincere, but if I work for your debit card bank, your mortgage company, or your small town mayor's office, once I see or have access to your info, and I mean legit access, I know things about you that cannot be "wished away." Once you give info to any company or government entity, it's out there, that's it! (A Word History is after the notes)

* Credit information companies use "scores" to put a number on your credit worthiness, and these credit scores are easily available to all kinds of individuals, employers, or credit grantors. Your more detailed info is, in theory, a bit more protected, but any business, including landlords, can "subscribe" (pay a fee) to a credit reporting company not only to see if you paid American Express for your last trip to the ski slopes or to the beaches of southern Florida, but whether you still owe on a student loan, a car, or a vacation home, and how much it is exactly that you owe on any of them.

** Having done a lot of genealogy over the years, I learned from genealogy researchers that in times past, if a woman became "with child" before marriage, it was not unheard of for the couple, and sometimes not even the actual "father" (no easy tests back then), to head off to some official, like a justice of the peace, in an area not necessarily all that far away, and get married. They had a certificate (usually) to show they had been wed, and in those times, your neighbor had to be pretty damned nosey to travel maybe twenty or thirty miles by horse or buggy to snoop on the couple's record and match up a child's birth with the marriage date; although I'm sure the "hell fire and damnation" folks probably did just that.

WORD HISTORY:
Camera-One source says this word goes back to Indo European "kam," but it was only one source. Greek, an ancient Indo European language related to English further down the family tree, had "kamara," which meant "something with an arched cover or vaulted room." Latin (also Indo European) borrowed the word, with the same basic meaning. English then took the word from Latin in the early part of the 1700s. Around that same time, the word was also being used for "a small black box with a lens that transferred images to an inside part of the device," as a short form of "camera obscura," or "dark chamber." By the mid 1800s, it became the word for a "device that takes pictures." As you may have noticed, it is closely related to CHAMBER, which is simply the French form of Latin "camera," and was borrowed into English in the 1200s. It therefore has the same history as "camera." French is a Latin-based language, albeit with a number of Germanic borrowings, when Germanic "Frankish" literally was absorbed by the Latin dialects spoken in much of what is now modern France.