Essay Test – August 26, 2017

I THINK I HAVEN’T UPLOADED THEM PROPERLY. IT IS IN REVERSE ORDER I.E LAST PAGE IS FIRST, AND FIRST IS LAST. PLZ REVIEW GUYS.

It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy—–

Individual privacy is an important dimension of human life. The need for privacy is almost as old as the human species.
Today,privacy right faces important challenges and troubles for several reasons in a way that the continuation of this sanctuary right is confronted serious threats and plagues.

The development of advanced and modern technologies in the present century and human achievements in these sciences and technology facilities, besides all their own great and positive advantages, make
PEOPLE’s privacy to be violated. It causes the exposure of all people’s lives corners to the public presence and view as though people were living in a glass room. When their lives became apparent before the
public, their privacy was taken from them. Particularly, the speed development and expansion of technologies results in destruction of boundaries and limitations. So, taking care of people’s privacy confronts with serious impediments and challenges.

Social media is designed to share information and we are good citizens doing only lawful things hence have nothing to hide. We are given a free product so that they can collect private data about you to share it with advertisers but people are willingly giving up their “Right to privacy”. Technology has changed the extent of privacy that we can enjoy, people has to accept the reality. Even if we are not using Social media people can share about us our photos on web without our consent. With increasing access to private data, analysis techniques, and increasing computational power can process a private data like Birth date, Birth location, current location about a person and gather sensitive information which should not be in public.

For example Social Security Number of a person: By analyzing a public data set called the “Death Master File,” which contains SSNs and birth information for people who have died.

In many cases, knowing the date and state of an individual’s birth was enough to predict a person’s SSN. If we believe that we are not doing anything wrong and hence don’t have anything to hide then are we fine to share our email address publically it would only reveal to everyone.

how we’ve willingly allowed our privacy to be taken away, and how we might be able to get some of it back

Google apps such as Gmail and Google calendar allow individuals and organizations to bring order to the hectic process of scheduling and communicating.
“When Google first started, it said it would only use that information internally, to get a sense of the things you like and talk about.All that information used to be gathered in a way where you explicitly gave permission, through things like surveys. But Google can easily poke around without seeking permission, and they don’t explain to you how they know what they know

It’s getting increasingly harder NOT to find someone on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or all of the above. Then there’s Myspace and a lot of lesser-known social networking sites. If you use these programs — and you
probably do — chances are pretty good that you give up a lot of your privacy every day, willingly and even happily. Security experts have spent a lot of time ringing the alarm bell over this lately, because bad people can easily take the personal tidbits you post and use it against you, for everything from marketing to blackmail.
Privacy is evaporating because Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and blogs are raising a generation of kids and adults who have no concept of privacy or the ability to truly understand that nothing digital
is ever forgotten or destroyed

In this fast-paced world, people use special transponders to blow through highway toll stations without stopping and pay for gas without having to swipe a credit card. Then there are those cards you present at the grocery store for discounts. All have technology that can be used to track your movements and habits, right down to the time of day you typically go through a toll plaza each morning on the drive to work.
add RFID chips, the Real ID Act and the PASS Act to the list as well. How about chips in passports? We’re lulled into a false sense of security and people aren’t realizing that they are simply giving those rights to privacy away.

GPS navigation used to be a luxury item. Now most of us use the technology. It’s relatively inexpensive to buy a GPS device that’s bolted to the dashboard. Higher-end cars come with built-in GPS. And there are plenty of free navigation apps available for the BlackBerry and iPhone. The flip side to fewer people getting lost is that the providers of those systems can track your whereabouts without breaking a sweat

Here’s one you may not have seen coming. The increasingly popular Kindle allows us to tear through books on the go. But the device also “keeps track of what you read, how quickly you read it, what you may have read over several times, and can delete content you’ve paid for without your knowledge should it become ‘necessary

An important reason why privacy matters is not having to explain or justify oneself. We may do a lot of things which, if judged from afar by others lacking complete knowledge or understanding, may seem odd or
embarrassing or worse. It can be a heavy burden if we constantly have to wonder how everything we do will be perceived by others and have to be at the ready to explain.

Hence we must be educated about the sensitivity of their private data, we must know with whom our data is shared, which information is shared , when and purpose of collecting information .

Humility is not cowardice. Meekness is not weakness.

The topic strikes at the core of human values with respect to how we humans, as a race over the years have viewed and valued various attributes such as Humility and Meekness. Human values though are quite transitionary with the given times, they are often by larger societies broadly categorised as desirable and non-desirable or atleast the perception of it, even if not explicitly worded.

Humility as a word has broadly come to represent a trait where somebody lets the work/inherent quality speak for themselves rather than him explicitly wording the greatness of it at every possible opportunity. Meekness on the other hand represents somebody who is more quiet, submissive and patient.

The Human values or attributes of Humility and Meekness have travelled a long distance in the past and had various dimensions and views to it. The act of kings disguising as monks and going out to assess the mood of the Public or them bowing down to the elderly and religious saints can be said to fall in the category of Humility. Such acts though were highly appreciated and lauded by the subjects then and by the readers of history as the sign of a good King now. On the other hand ambitious and successful kings with huge empires like Aurangzeb never earned such respect in history for their sheer arrogance. The Great king Ashoka’s denouncement of violence after enlightenment and working for the welfare of people could be another example of humility of accepting what was wrong and working on correcting the past mistakes. Such an act needs a lot of courage and specially when it’s a public acceptance of one being wrong all the time. However it can be the farthest possible from cowardice.

Meekness similarly is a trait which is contextual and has to be seen in the light of what and when. It can’t be generalised as a sign of weakness since History shows us various examples when it wasn’t. Gandhi Ji’s acts of truth and non-violence might be categorised by many as meekness but never can it be termed as weakness, since it were the same values which helped an entire generation of nationalists won independence for the country. The same could be said for Martin Luther King Jr’s march for peace and end of racial discrimination.

Humility as a trait in the Indian culture specifically always been lauded and people with such quality often respected by one and all. There are examples galore ranging from Lal Bahadur Shastri to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam to Rahul Dravid. Humility is often seen in the Indian context as having one’s feet on the ground while one might have achieved great things in life. An often heard advice by the elders would be: “Don’t let success get into your head and failure to your Heart”. Humility thus is more representative of a virtue which represents a pinnacle of successful individual’s personality.

Meekness similarly is not just a representation of quietly accepting things and situation but a part of rather larger response to the situation or merely one’s way to register their opinion in a more patient and subtle manner. There are examples again from the Indian current context who might look Meek by the virtue of their soft spoken nature or patience but can seldom be categorised as weak. Irom Sharmila or Anna Hazare might look like petite figures which have a very accommodating stance but their way of protest to things might be much more stronger than even the loudest on the scene.

Even in the international arena, where relations between nations are much more complex and decided by multiple factors and stakeholders simultaneously, one can never always be on the offensive. The most recent example of the logjam at the Doklam plateau where India as well as China showed a lot of restraint inspite of the all heated commentary and views, it is only patience and dialogue which has been helpful in keeping the situation under control. A restrain on the statements urging for peace than conflict here was beneficial for both and might be the best way forward than any other more aggressive stance.

Similar parallels can be extended to the most famous academicians, scientists and Nobel prize winners of our generation who more often than not share the trait of humility and in many cases might turn out to be meek at a superficial look. The examples range from Kailash Satyarthi to Md. Yunus to R Venkatramnana.

Though such examples and cross section of History does make us think as Humility and Meekness to be most valued virtues it isn’t absolute and without exceptions. This is especially true in the case of today’s faced paced, multidimensional and web connected world. The social networks such as Facebook and Instagram which flourish on the theory that Human beings love attention make us rethink the previous hypothesis on Humility and Meekness. A large part of people’s success these days is determined by how famous and connected they are on the social networks. If an artist makes a video and uploads it, his success is determined by the number of likes and shares he gets on the video. This definitely has democratised the entire process of content creation and sharing but also invariably pushes people to be at the top of their voice in asking and nudging people to know them and follow what they do.

While this can also be contested by examples such as Salman Khan whose educational videos got viral and famous just by the sheer quality of content and without any advertising, a large part of the web doesn’t give us the same picture.

So, while Humility and Meekness earlier relied on the inherent qualities and beauty of the content to speak for itself, a lot of it, given the advent of social media has turned into pushing and marketing the individual for the fear of not getting left behind.

Does this mean that we have no longer Humility and Meekness as traits as they were seen earlier and have they become irrelevant in the current context. I would refrain from making that conclusion. This is because the mediums and ways of doing things might change for the change in technology and the way consumers/people want things these days; the inherent traits of people can’t be defined merely by the way they conduct themselves online. There is lot to one than just their online persona.

Thus while Humility and Meekness might change their representations and how people view them in the light of a specific situation, to categorise them as what the statement says; which is Humility as cowardice and Meekness as weakness would be the most inappropriate generalisation ever to have been done regarding the most basic of Human trait, the trait of a species which itself is so varied across places, across generations and across it’s views on different issues.