We live in pretty interesting times . The people’s views have changed quite dramatically . Yesterday’s taboos are today’s accepted practices. This is especially true in North America. Things like gay marriage and marijuana legalization could not be imagined during the 50s, but today it’s a reality in certain states.

The IT sector had a major influence on many of these cultural shifts. Electronic storage and data extraction from huge depositories of information facilitated many tedious tasks. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been in the past to find the right document in those paper mountains. Imagine using a ladder to get to the right shelf?. Now it is done with a click of a button. Another advantage is that back ups are made and stored in different locations. Before, if a paper was destroyed it was the end.

Unfortunately this is a 2 sided coin. Bad guys can also gain access to these databases. This means that our privacy is at the mercy of the database security. Even the latest firewalls and ant viruses cannot guarantee that information will not leak.

It’s scary, but it doesn’t mean we should revert back to stone age. There are many examples of how technology can help regular people access large databases. number-private-search.com/954/603/ comes to mind.

It allows a person to run a simple reverse telephone number lookup and find out who the owner of a telephone number is. It has a lot of useful applications in our everyday lives. For example 800 reverse phone lookup services allow a person to find out the name of the organization that was calling him. This is also an effective method to catch a prank caller.

Unfortunately this innocent service can be used in a bad way.

A person who is using reverse telephone lookup might be a stalker too. He might be looking up information about a person who is not returning his phone calls.

Sometimes there is a really thin line between danger and convenience. There are no easy answers when it comes to privacy.

In my view it is up to the people to decide what information should be collected and disclosed. Our expressions of freedom are like small grains which are easy to lose but hard to get back. Our children might one day find themselves in a complete privacy nightmare. At that point it will be too late to do anything. I see only one possible solution which can help us avoid this nightmare. I believe that privacy matters should be voted on by every citizen.