Look around you. Look up at the corners of buildings. Look at the ceilings of department stores. Those domes you see, those are cameras. I know you know this, but do you know what they represent?

When 9/11 hit us, in order to feel safe, we allowed the government to tap into our lives. Not many objected because we were told we were at war, but the truth is we have given up so many of our freedoms by the time 9/11 came we had already abdicated so much of our privacy to others. In the rise of internet access, many of us have willingly shared more secrets about ourselves than any agency could dig up. There are commercials that use the scare tactic to get people to sign up for services to find out what your credit score is. They claim without knowing your true score, you might be denied a job. Well, that’s true, and not just for high paying financial jobs. There was an article I read online, I believe it was the LA Times, where a woman was working part time at a department store. She was doing rather well and she thought she would get a full time job. They ran a credit check on her, saw she had been behind on payments due to being unemployed and they fired her.

While in the past that might have been considered an extremely rare case, many employers are looking for ways of weeding out applicants and the checking financial records and especially looking at social networking sites is a way of doing this. How many stories have you heard in the past few years about people being fired because of postings on Facebook or MySpace? The sad thing is you don’t even have to be the one to post them on your site. If someone else takes a picture of you and posts that on their site it can be searched out. The recent incident at UCSD with the Compton Cook Out; that invitation was placed on Facebook. Defenders of the event have set up Facebook pages and people are joining them. In the heat of the moment they have joined the page, but if they want to get a job years later, would they want their employer to know they were supportive of the Compton Cook-Out? Might that prove a deal breaker if they are applying for a job?

Privacy used to be something Americans held onto for dear life. Now it’s something we talk about yet we give up at the drop of a hat without thinking. We want a credit card and we will give out our personal information. Do we know where that information goes? I remember the story of a teacher who went to Cancun, entered a wet T-shirt contest. The photos were posted online by the bar that sponsored it, students found out and posted them on their sites and soon the teacher was forced to leave. She was on her own time, in another country being a human being, yet once they got on the web she was terminated.

We kind of look at the extreme things and use those as a basis for thinking our lives are fine. We don’t think the little incidents matter until one day there’s a sea change and we have been blindsided for it. When I started Chaotic Fringe I was a firebrand and willing to let go with my emotion. While age has tempered some of that anger, I started looking at the stories about companies gaining access to our personal information and started considering how this might affect me. A few years ago when I typed my name online there wasn’t a lot out there about me. When I did a search on my sister there was nothing other than the article written about her soon after her death. When I did a check on my name I saw listing for me on film projects I forgot I had worked on, I saw my name on games I worked on years ago. I was shocked to see a comic book I wrote almost 15 years ago was being sold on eBay by someone in the Philippines. That doesn’t count the countless articles I’ve posted on Chaotic Fringe, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

All that I saw was the information I have passed out freely, and I’m someone aware of what can be found on the web. The thing is you don’t need to be an expert to check up on people. There was someone who was asking me some detailed questions on a subject but the answers they were giving me were wrong, at least in my eyes. When I asked them more about it they told me they got the information from an ‘expert.’ They gave me the name of the person and within 10 minutes I was able to go to their site, cross-referenced their credentials and proved the person was a fraud because the degrees and work they said they had didn’t confirm what was on the professional sites.

We have been taken by reality shows and social networking sites. We are willing to tell all to the world, somehow thinking that information will be kept with friends. We forget that the web is interconnected and all can see what is out there, both friend and foe. Our privacy is something of a myth now, because we have been willing participants in killing it.