Privacy

Privacy. It no longer exists in this increasingly digitized world, right?
How many people have you told your social security number to? A few at Kumble Hall? Maybe your employer? Does your mom know? And this isn't a problem because they don't memorize this information to use against you, right? Right? Why are we known by numbers anyway? The big government database of people and their information is something we don't think about in our everyday lives. Number 000000000001 is a white male, 37 years old, in this tax bracket, with this number of children, divorced, no prior arrests and God knows what else information. All of this exists and has existed since Social Security has.
People were paranoid about all of this information being kept in a solitary space and some are still not comfortable with the idea, leading to all sorts of conspiracy theories involving the government spying on people. However, these conspiracy theorists don't take into account the all powerful, omniscient being that is the Internet.
Evan Ratliff's experiment on trying to disappear was very telling. He had to work really hard to drop off the grid, creating misinformation and not just electronically. He lied to everyone he met, changed his appearance and even stopped using his own car. The effort it required to stay unfound was too much for him. He had to use the help of people online and had to check what his hunters were theorizing to throw them off.
All of these precautions were to avoid being found but they weren't all digital precautions. There were precautions against other humans who could meet him and maybe blog about it, putting him back on the grid, against the world, traffic light cameras could get images of him or his car. Ratliff assumed a fake name and used cash transactions, but couldn't sustain his cover for as long as he had posited.
This article does bring up an important question about people's privacy. We assume it's there because it's not being violated, but in reality, if someone wanted to, they could most likely find out everything about us twice and then steal our identity. However, the notion of privacy still exists and some people are truly off the grid. People born into homelessness may not have been born in a hospital. There is no record of their existence, no social security number and I doubt they have Twitters. Do they exist? Of course they do. But according to the Internet, they don't. Perhaps they have the closest thing to privacy that one can hope for in this day and age.