Privacy and the net

Social networking sites are often used by government ministers as an example of the profound way attitudes to privacy have changed. They argue that the young generation invade their own privacy to a far greater extent than the government ever would. The implication is that the older people who object to government intrusion are living in the past.

The response to this is that people who use social networking sites voluntarily reveal things about themselves and have a degree of control of over how long information and photographs stay in the public domain, while the government collects and stores information without permission and allows the subject no access to the data held.