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America is in a privacy crisis. It has been brought about by the advances in the internet and our human tendency/need for being noticed.The internet's original intention was to be used for sharing of scientific data and information among persons involved in research. Today the internet provides the same information sharing capability at dramatic increases in speed and file size as well as providing a platform for every type of perversion and idea that would have previously been kept to the mind of the owner.

The convenience and ease of posting information has made the web an excellent and useful marketing tool for business, resource for education, and has changed the delivery of news and information (and mis-information) forever. Software design enables first time authors and artists to do work that only years of study and training could achieve before. And social networking has enabled people to share information, much of it private and dangerously private, with the world.

Our need to be known, appreciated or liked, and just to be "famous" in some way has made the use of social networking a very prominent tool in today's marketing, tracking of buying trends (cookies are more than chocolate chip to a programmer), and predators. The movement to placing everything from liens, convictions, bankruptcy information and medical data online has led to serious questions about whether or not making the information that had to be physically researched in hardcopy available to anyone. The First Amendment proponents opine that any public information should be accessible by anyone. The question "what is public information" comes to the front. Apparently today, anything that is posted on the internet becomes "public information"; retraction of false or libelous statements is almost impossible.

The ability of a hostile government body to gather previous private or inaccessible information, reading habits, buying habits, even travel and communications records, is unlimited. The Patriot Act's very open interpretation has shown this. Technology can easily bypass the requisite court orders for telephone monitoring or e-mailing. Where do we go next to stop this continued erosion of our believed idea of privacy? Unfortunately, short of a massive electro magnetic pulse, sunspot or other catastrophe that alters our electronic environment, electronic communication, eavesdropping, spying and just telling everyone your most secret desires via your social networking page will go on.

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