Privacy in the Internet age

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish; she has graciously shared with us her thoughts about privacy.

Some of us got to talking about privacy the other day, wondering how much of it we have today compared to a half century or more ago, and whether privacy is as valued today as it used to be. When you hear about kids sending nude photos of themselves to their friends on cell phones, you have to wonder whether they have any concept at all of discretion, let alone privacy. And it does seem that some people are willing to put all kinds of videos of themselves on an Internet site called You Tube.

A cautionary tale of one unintended consequence of all this was reported on Yahoo News recently. An American visitor to Prague in the Czeck Republic passed a store window and was surprised to see a huge photo of a family he knew in Missouri. What was their photo doing there? He took a photo of the photo and sent it to the people back home. It turns out that this was the Christmas photo the family sent out last year and they also put it on their blog and on a few “social networking sites.”

Once something gets on the Internet, I guess, you never know where it will end up or what use someone will make of it. The storeowner in Prague said he thought it was just a computer generated image when he took it off of the Internet and had no idea it was an image of a real family. Meanwhile the Missouri folks said next time they post a photo online, they’ll do something to make it hard to reproduce the image.

Obviously, technology has moved faster than our ability to adapt to it. Our former habits of mind just don’t always take into account all of the possibilities that exist these days. Even those of us who do think about protecting our privacy may not realize how quickly we agree to give it up.

For instance, when I shop at a supermarket and use that “club member” discount card, a computer is keeping track of what I buy and how often I come to the store. The store owners probably use such information for their own marketing purposes. The receipt prints out my name so the cashier can use it in wishing me a nice day, so if I happen to lose the receipt in the parking lot, somebody finding it will know what food and beverages I buy, what ailments I may be trying to cure with over the counter medicines, and how many more sandwiches I have to buy to get a free one.

The concern about identity theft and invasion of privacy can lead some enterprising people to capitalize on this worry. Last week I got some mail from a catalog I’ve ordered things from occasionally. The mail was a check for $7.75. A refund? Did I overpay for an order? I was curious so I looked at it carefully. I saw the statement, “By cashing or depositing this check you are purchasing a membership in ‘PrivacyGuard’. Read important details on reverse.” On the reverse was a notice that by endorsing the check I would be signing up for this service, whatever it is, and that my credit card would be charged $159.99 for the first year’s service unless I called to cancel it. I decided to guard my privacy by tearing up the check.

When it comes to balancing privacy and technology, I guess it all comes down to using common sense and being aware of the age we live in, an age when an image or statement you think was uttered in privacy can circle the globe in moments. I don’t want to be paranoid about it, but I want to be sensible. Personally, I like privacy. Sometimes I keep my thoughts private. And sometimes I don’t. Like today.


Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be reached at collins1@rushmore.com.

Oahe TV: Pierre depends on it

While attending the 2009 South Dakota State Historical Society History Conference in Pierre last month, I noticed a young man videotaping the various speakers and struck up a conversation with him.

Patrick Callahan is a “one-man show” for Oahe TV, operated by the City of Pierre. It was a serendipitous meeting, since just the evening before – while sequestered in a room at the Kings Inn – I watched a Pierre City Commission meeting on Oahe TV, an “access” channel provided by the cable television franchisee.

What impressed me about the broadcast was its professionalism. This was not a one-camera, high school production (with apologies to high schools and C-SPAN, which can and do produce some outstanding material with a single camera). The City of Pierre contracts with Callahan to run Oahe TV and can be rightfully proud of this service, which provides a close-up view of city government and school board activity in the Pierre and Fort Pierre communities.

Think of it as a local C-SPAN-type service.

Callahan says the city uses part of the cable franchise fee paid by Midcontinent Communications to run Oahe TV. It’s about an $83,000 line item in the city budget, but Oahe TV also contracts out to folks like the State Historical Society convention and other events to help off-set costs.

That’s a small price to pay for the resources delivered by Oahe TV. Not only are their informational programs available on cable television, they’re archived and available on the worldwide web. Take a look at their website at www.oahetv.com. It includes a comprehensive local weather site, too.

From time-to-time, I’ve happened across a “Government Channel” on Knology Cable in Spearfish. I’ve never seen anything but Rapid City meetings televised, and many of those have been poorly produced – bad audio or video, or both. Pierre does it well, and Mayor Laurie Gill says "the community has come to depend on it."

Spearfish Ward 2 councilman Paul Young tells me there's been some discussion about such a service in Spearfish over the years, but nothing has ever come of it. It seems to me it would be a valuable tool in helping make city government more transparent and accessible.

The City of Spearfish is already pretty progressive. It has developed a great City Park, and numerous neighborhood parks provide most neighborhoods with a delightful place to picnic and let the kids play. We’re particularly fond of the five-mile bike/walking path that abuts Spearfish Creek. Perhaps the greatest testament to the wisdom of city fathers in building the path: it is used extensively.

Making city government more accessible and transparent through a service modeled after Oahe TV in Pierre would be another valuable asset for Spearfish. Like the bicycle path, it, too, would be used extensively, and we’d be a better community for it.

Lorraine Collins Remembers D-Day

Realizing that President Obama is joining other world leaders to observe the 65th anniversary of the landing of Allied forces in France on D Day on June 6th, I remembered that I had written something about that historic event 15 years ago. That was on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of D Day when I was a commentator for South Dakota Public Radio. Although a decade and a half has passed since I wrote this, nothing has happened since then to change my view. The essay mentions Rwanda, but if I were to write it today, I might mention Darfur, or Gaza, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq….

The view from D-Day beaches - SDPR , June 27, 1994:

It must be a decade ago by now that I stood on the western shore of France on a high bluff overlooking the sea and contemplated the famous beaches of the D-Day invasion of World War II. Since we’ve just observed the 50th anniversary of that tremendous and historic day, I’ve been remembering my visit and the mixture of awe and admiration I felt as I stood there.

Nearby is the great American Cemetery and visiting that brought a terrible sense of loss. The liberation of Europe was made possible only by great sacrifices by ordinary people. War always comes down to this—thousands of graves with names carved in stone. And there the bodies lie, all these years later.

There are a lot of other battlefields and military cemeteries in Europe, from several wars and I happened to visit a few of them during the time I lived in England. I followed the paths of World War I trenches in Belgium, strolled around the site of the Battle of the Bulge, stood on the hill overlooking the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon fought Wellington and 20,000 men died in one afternoon.

I spent a night in a big, creepy old hotel in the town of Verdun, a city that seemed to be one vast mausoleum, with a huge war memorial at one end of the Main Street, topped by a glowering, helmeted figure leaning on a sword. Near Verdun, which was the site of the most brutal and continuous shelling of World War I, there is a cemetery containing the remains of 130,000 unidentifiable, unknown soldiers, both German and French.

Visiting battlefields and military cemeteries is a very sobering experience, and it should be. We should never forget what war means, never glamorize it, never romanticize it, never enter into it blindly and carelessly. Visiting military cemeteries helps us remember that.

But what I’m afraid of is that war has now evolved in such brutal new ways that such formal, well-tended, sanctified burial sites have in a sense become obsolete. Even by the end of World War II, the lives of millions of people were ended without honor and bravery on the battlefield but in concentration camps or in the firestorms of bombed cities. The dead were buried not in neat and orderly rows in hallowed ground but under heaps of rubble or in mass graves.

And now, we hear that 500,000 people have been killed in the mindless warfare in Rwanda, just in the last few weeks. It’s not possible to dig 500,000 graves.

If war was ever a sane and manageable activity, it doesn’t seem to be so now. Wars used to be fought in fields, in trenches, in fox holes, on the sea, in the air. Now wars are fought in schools and hospitals and market places and refugee camps. Now there is no distinction between being a soldier and a civilian, between men and women, adults and children. All are slaughtered without conscience or hesitation.

In an era in which whole populations are involved in war, and military cemeteries are becoming obsolete, dare we hope that one day war will be obsolete, too?

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be contacted at collins1@rushmore.com.