<p>Should people make more of an effort to keep some things private?</p>
<p>People should make more of an effort to keep some things private. Protecting privacy is your responsibility. Unless someone forcibly takes your privacy from you, by stealing your computer or invading your home, it is your duty as an individual to choose how much you wish other people to know about you.
In today's society, we don't respect our privacy as much as our ancestors did. I did not make this up, in fact chances are you have abandoned your privacy yesterday or the day before. Why? Social media. Social media includes websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Social media is supposed to be a way you can talk to friends whether they be next door neighbors, or the sister of a family you lived with in Germany. That's the instant appeal of these websites, I think that if on the Facebook sign up, there was a little disclaimer telling people of the dangers of sharing every detail of their personal lives, people wouldn't sign up. So as Americans, we know that privacy should be important, but we neglect this because we are more interested in image. Image is public, it's what the masses think of you, you can do your best to make your image splendid, but human nature will not allow everyone to look at you as such. Facebook is not evil, it's not forcing you to post private information. But one of the best examples of the consequences of posting private information, is people posting that they're leaving on vacation, and letting everyone know that there's no one to watch the house. This is a self inflicted wound. Social media is completely voluntary I believe.
One major scare we have had in America was the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act. The act would allow the government to monitor the population's internet activities. This put the American public into shock, mainly because everyone uses the internet, and to find the answers the internet surfers want, the internet surfers must add details they don't want anyone else to see or find out. This is when the American population stood its ground for its privacy. Nobody wanted to feel as if there was a presence checking on what he was searching. If you had a record following your google search, you wouldn't genuinely search anything at all. The Americans chose, and they chose to make their own decisions about their privacy for once.
People need to be in charge of their own actions, and need to think about being a person versus being an image. Images don't exist, but people do.</p>