The battle between privacy and transparency rages on in the 21st century

There are reports today that 1.2 billion individuals had their data leaked which included their personal information and activity on linkedin, facebook, etc.

We live in a world where compromising your privacy more and more has become essential to have convenience, something we can't live without in today's world. Whether you are an employee or startup or small business, the norm is progressing towards unspoken transparency, which is an implicit assumption that if you have nothing to hide, why would you do ever it!

As an engineering graduate, I want to have a good job and the first places a prospective employer will look when I apply for one is my linkedin and github, twitter and facebook, etc. As a result, I need these tools to market myself, it has almost become a question of survival at this stage. Once I get the job and start forming a circle, peer pressure will dictate that I use WhatsApp and compromise my privacy further. Since I live in a society, I cannot say no to it, lest my boss starts thinking that I'm unsocial or something!

If I protest that I want my privacy, the unspoken transparency comes up again: you are not supposed to hide anything if you have nothing to hide! Of course, we are taught to not disclose basic private tokens like our passwords, bank account numbers and PIN, etc. but that isn't really enough these days, privacy is a lot more complex than that in the digital age (which doesn't really exist, of course!).

The fact that no shouts are being raised despite such a huge leak is testament to the fact that people aren't really concerned about privacy today. As long as they protect these basic tokens like passwords and PINs and nobody is able to hack them, they seem to be fine with it. But digital life isn't so simple and hackers are always evolving with newer and newer ways to get at you.

Doxing is very much a thing these days. If some crazed lunatic doesn't like what you posted on social media, they'll try to find more information about you (which includes leaks like these) and then start posting it everywhere. Though it may be publicly available information, can you even imagine the trauma of someone who goes through it? It affects not just the one who is doxed but their family and friends too.

I hope that humanity starts learning and caring about privacy before its too late and such incidents become common and worse. Europe did a great thing recently by introducing GDPR (though its debatable how much it really helped the privacy of a common European citizen!). More and more world governments need to take this issue seriously before its too late.