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Right now, my soul is divided. For I am both a man of a generation where children were spanked and people believed in their privacy. Things as critical as keeping your children in check and your mouth closed about your private life with a spouse, girlfriend or partner have all been compromised.

Which begs the question…have we gone too far? Privacy in 2014 is an idea of recollection, not habit. In a matter of weeks, Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was suspended indefinitely by the NFL, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson was deactivated indefinitely by Minnesota Vikings and a host of female celebrities including Gabrielle Union, Meagan Good and Jill Scott have had private, explicit pictures exposed. That’s the world we live in today.

The right to privacy is on life support. Our homes and our relationships, are supposed to be considered sequestered places of comfort – our defense against the world and its challenges. Yet, when you make your first cellphone call of the day, your service provider knows who you called and for how long. Your phone echoes against a tower somewhere so that somebody can tell almost exactly where you are. When you leave home, surveillance cameras follow you everywhere.

And while this may be cool in search-and-rescue situations, it’s not so cool when companies like Retina X Studios can sell software that lets anybody spy on your location and message traffic. Needless to say, if you’ve had an iPhone, Windows Phone or Android device in the past 3 years, your phone contacts and photos have likely been saved in the cloud.

We have to take a look at ourselves and our ridiculous addiction to technology and the invasiveness that it brings. If you were to look back say some 20, 30 years, is it likely that any of your private information would be so easily accessible? Most likely not. Would it be likely that someone other than yourself could easily access it? Almost certainly not. Did you survive just fine? Sure you did.

Get this, a recent survey commissioned by the employment website CareerBuilder, found that 37 percent of hiring managers use social networking sites to research job applicants, with over 65 percent of that group using Facebook as their principal means of information. Now I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty invasive. Don’t you think?

That means you get to see pictures of my children, my friends, my parents and even my relationship status. How do you know I want you knowing that much about me? My work history is all you should need to know. Unless of course, I committed a few crimes along the way.

COMMENTARY: Is Privacy As We Know It Dead?  was originally published on blackamericaweb.com

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