Treasure the privacy of old-fashioned newspapers

By: JAMES L. CONDOMITTI - Commentary | Friday, July 27, 2007 11:53 PM PDT ∞

Hold on tight to this newspaper as you read it. It may be the last sanctuary of privacy where you can still read news articles, informative commentaries and opinions on any subject or issue. This newspaper gives us the freedom to formulate opinions and ideas within the domain of our minds anytime, anyplace. Someday our ability to read without privacy may disappear overnight into a sea of electromagnetic radio waves and bits and bytes.

Currently we have the choice to receive newspapers in our driveways or purchase them in the store. You can take this newspaper anywhere without anyone looking over your shoulder taking notes. You are free to make judgments, form opinions, agree or disagree with the nature or content of the news articles, opinions or commentaries you have read. No one or any computer database can make a conclusion based on your thoughts, allege or accuse you of a hate crime or thought, or intent to commit one, based upon the articles they may think you have read. We can also express our thoughts and opinions in this same newspaper. This is freedom of speech in its purest form, subject to an editor's discretion.

We will be at fault if we let this coveted, tangible folded stack of newsprint disappear. There could be a day when we may be able to receive the news only via the Internet, cell phone, PDA, hand-held computer, or television. Is there a danger lurking within your high-tech, wireless, online-based purveyor of news and communication?

If we choose or are forced to use new technology in our homes, libraries, Internet cafes or the workplace, we are subject to every word we read or picture we view either being scrutinized for evil intent, abuse of company assets, or compiled in a data warehouse for later retrieval by an employer, police or marketing firms vying for lucrative databases that have formed profiles of each of us.

If we use these devices to read or research controversial or benign subject matter, we have voluntarily given up more privacy to databases that can store, profile and compel us to think twice before we read an article that may offend, discriminate or convict us of a thought or hate crime just on the basis of reading. We will not feel free to read or look up a polemical subject without fear of someone inferring or misinterpreting our intentions, beliefs or opinions. Today, we still possess that freedom in North San Diego County and America.

As new technology creeps in, titillates our primal desires and seduces more inductees into using these electronic devices, corporate, paper-based media moguls bowing to shareholders may smirk at the bottom line, reduce more news staff and ultimately eliminate paper-based newspapers in lieu of online, satellite, wireless-based mass media communication. Are you comfortable with someone or computer databases compiling lists of the subject matter you read? Are you ready to look out to your driveway some morning and not see this newspaper?

James L. Condomitti lives in Escondido.