Screaming for your privacy

You'd better fucking call me back. Are you trying to exhaust me? 'Cause you're doing a real good job of it. I'm done chasing you -- you do this so many times and then it just becomes fucking old." "You've tortured me all day and night. You'd better fucking call me back if you ever want this to work out. I hope you're happy being a lonely guy. You wanna be with me, yeah, right, great, thanks. Thanks a lot. I hate you." "If you're having a good time right now, well, then, fuck you." These are the real voice mail messages from a woman who has just broken up with her boyfriend of eight months. Wavering and unsure of herself, the woman's voice is broken by intermittent sobs as she alternately curses, cries and screams at her boyfriend in over 50 messages just like the ones transcribed above. Who hasn't known the pain of a recent breakup? Who doesn't somehow feel sorry for this woman? All of us have had traumatic emotional moments. All of us have cried and screamed over broken relationships. And if we haven't said the same words to our exes that this woman said to her ex-boyfriend, many of us have certainly thought them. The difference is, we've been able to keep our secrets to ourselves. If I want to trash an ex-boyfriend, I can relish in the fact that unless I have really untrustworthy friends, my calling him a "tremendous, steaming bag of feces" won't be spread around. That's the beauty of privacy. But the fact of the matter is, I don't know this woman. I don't know her ex-boyfriend. I actually know nothing else about her beyond her voice mail messages. Above all, I don't know why I was given the opportunity to listen to her voice mail messages in the first place. But although this woman has nothing to do with my personal life, I've listened to 10 of her desperate, sobbing phone messages to some random guy I've never met, all in the comfort of my own home. Thanks to this woman's ex-boyfriend -- who has cruelly converted her voice mail messages into MP3 files to be shared -- privacy has become as obsolete as pet rocks named Skippy. It's bad enough to think that our worst emotional moments might be broadcasted by our hateful exes at any given moment; but violations of privacy as disturbing as this, if not more so, have extended far beyond the sharing of voice mail messages -- right here at Penn. Most of us go through our days at Penn in a relative routine, unsuspecting that our privacy is susceptible to manipulation at any time. But within the past year, several "privacy scandals" have emerged from the dredge and routine of University life. You're not as safe as you think you are. Only two weeks ago, one University employee was caught using Penn students' social security numbers in order to apply for credit cards. Only after credit card companies called students asking for a verification of address was the fraud exposed. Last semester, hundreds of Penn students received a random e-mail from "Dr. Brian J. Kelley" about scientific research. How did he get our e-mail addresses? And how can we stop people like him from getting them in the future? And just a few weeks ago, an embittered ex-boyfriend at Penn posted his former girlfriend's "for your eyes only" pornographic videos on his Web site for all to see. Whether it's the broadcasting of deeply personal voice mail messages, or the easy access people both inside and outside of the Penn community have to our personal information, it's clear that emotional and factual privacy has lost its value, and has become as useless as the "universal language" -- Esperanto -- to a group of blind and deaf French mimes. Where do we go from here? Can privacy be rescued? An alumna of the Penn Law School concerned with cases on privacy issues recently said, "The World Wide Web had tremendous potential to ensnare us and our individuality in its tangles. Commercial profiling and 'spam' e-mailing proliferate due to cookies and the lack of digital privacy. This can only be fixed by more technical and actual respect for each other's privacy. We need to be smart consumers and smart people, ready and willing to stand up for our rights." So get up. Stop sitting there. And rethink the value of privacy. It's time for a comeback.

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