Senior English major

Privacy: a hot topic in today’s political arena, driven by advancements in technology that make it increasingly easy to find personal information of others. Case in point: the recent security breach at this university that we have become so unfortunately familiar with. At a university as large as ours — with such impressive computer science programs and a stellar Cybersecurity Center — we expect our information to be safe. But it’s not.

When I was younger and my mom told me to be careful about what information I put on MySpace, such as my location or my age, I scoffed, thinking she was just being paranoid. But as I got older and started to watch the news more often, I began to see just how regular it was for young girls to be found and targeted because of social media. And of course, this is still happening. The wide variety of apps that ask you to turn on “location services” is obscene, and if you jailbreak your phone or have apps that are insecure, it is incredibly simple for predators to find you.

And these are just laymen. They are people who have been able to learn enough about technology to use it for their nefarious purposes.

So when the news broke that the National Security Agency is accessing phone calls on a large scale, everyone lost their minds. The thought that the government could have listened in to anything from your takeout order to your phone sex was devastating. Never mind that your sketchy Snapchats can be hacked into by even the most remedial computer geek (and for your information, the pictures are not just deleted into a black hole — they can be found on your phone’s history); that some apps post your location whenever you share something; or that accessing your bank account or any other personal information on an insecure network could compromise that information. But the government can get your information? How dare they.

Now, I’m not a proponent for handing over my privacy to the government. As I have written in a column before, “Privatized solutions to political problems,” I believe in most instances, the government should nose out and let people make their own moral and personal decisions. On social matters that affect peoples’ day-to-day lives and can mess with an individual’s happiness, the government has no business trying to dictate what is right and wrong.

But we need to come to terms with the idea that the government might in fact have our best interest at heart sometimes. I very much want to believe the NSA is telling the truth when representatives say the monitoring is for national security purposes and has led to the prevention of a number of potential catastrophes. But even if I don’t believe that, what is the big deal if some faceless government official might have heard snippets of a phone conversation of mine?

The people who truly have to worry about this are the ones doing something abhorrently wrong. If you’re worried about getting caught committing some petty crime, think about the fact that if you are corresponding with an accomplice via any electronic means, it is pretty easy for you to get caught. Think about the greater benefits of allowing the government to intercede when they find truly despicable individuals; this might help you find a glimmer of a possibility that there can be a little less bad in the world. That should matter a bit more than your desire to keep your purchase of an ounce of weed a secret.

[ READ MORE: Implications of Internet privacy ]