The world today is more technological and complex than ever. In this short article I will focus on the topic of privacy in cyberspace, and I would like to illuminate the topic of "no privacy" with the help of a few examples.
Privacy, and with it the right to privacy, did not concern us at the time of the creation of the world.
Much has been written about privacy in history books, literature, poetry and other places that are not in the scope of legislation.
There is no definition of the term "privacy" in the law in Israel, the 1981 Privacy Protection Law. In fact, there is no such definition in any law in the free world, a strange matter in itself.
The same privacy protection law deals with the citizen's right to privacy, violation of privacy, protection of privacy – all this without any explanation of what privacy is.
It is also interesting, in this context, that the Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1981 while the Internet joined us ten years later.
There is a lot of talk these days about "the public's right to know". We contribute, each according to our ability and according to the will of Google and its companies, to the loss of privacy on a personal level. The way we have done on the subject since the internet became a commodity for the masses (around 1998) or from the arrival of the smartphone (end of 2007) until the time when we upload photos of the food in the restaurant to the web, took less than twenty years.
I will quote here two examples in which older and wiser people than me say that the right to privacy is being trampled on.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in 2010 "Privacy is no longer a social norm". In the same year, Google's co-CEO Eric Schmidt said, in my free translation, "We know who you are, we know where you surfed, we can, more or less, know what you're thinking about."
I have no doubt that these two know what they are talking about in the core business of their companies. Moreover, since the words were said, as mentioned, in 2010, their knowledge on these issues has increased.
Today privacy is gone. It is impossible in the modern world to hide completely. Every activity on the network leaves digital signatures. As examples that each of us is familiar with, payment by credit card, membership in a customer club, use of navigation software, going through passport control, the number of cameras on the streets and the short amount of time that elapses from the occurrence of an event until its videos are released to the media.
I will give two examples out of many to demonstrate some of the lack of privacy. A great deal of information about which the state bothers to issue a gag order, in fact is visible to all. It takes a little knowledge to legally expose it. Most of the images in which figures appear that were blurred by the order of such an order, previously appeared on the Internet in a different context. You can take a blurry image to an application that deals with such exposure, Google Images is also a good solution for this issue, and the image that is not blurry immediately comes up.
Another example: information that is not hidden by an order and requires little knowledge, everything is visible.
Naftali Bennett, being the prime minister, flew to Moscow, from there to Berlin and back to Israel. An unusual route. The travel dates are known. With an easy search, you can find the flight on flight tracking sites such as FlightRadar24, see the flight path, the registration number of the plane (4X-CUZ), the type of plane (Hawker 800XP) and from there it's a short way to view the different journeys of the plane during the period in question. On another website it is possible, according to the number, to identify the details of the company that owns the plane.
These are two simple examples. There are many more complicated and less visible issues, in which it is possible with the help of not much knowledge to reveal what is happening around us.
Privacy fades. The legislator since then and always lags behind life. There is nothing new in this either. We as internet consumers must understand that as long as information is on a computer or smartphone and these are connected to the internet, we should not expect any privacy regarding this information.