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Jacob Reardon

Instructor: Malcolm Campbell

English 1103

February 5, 2013

Topic Proposal: Privacy: The War Technology Waged Against Society

Introduction/Overview

I will be researching the effects that technology has on the privacy of our society. There

are many positive aspects of technology but as technology continues to advance we seem to give

up more of our rights to privacy. Think of social media for example; everything you post on

Facebook or Twitter is available for most of the world to see. Once something is out on the

internet gets out, there’s no getting it back. Also take a look at text messages. All of the texts you

send are saved on some external server. The scary part is not knowing who has access to that

information and if they could use it to harm you in one way or another.

I have visited various websites and read many different articles regarding privacy. To

start my search I skimmed over a few articles and picked out a few names and key words from

them. The websites I used were mainly news sites (ie; fox news, msnbc, and the NY Times). The

names I found lead me to understand a lot more about how technology affects our privacy.

Initial Inquiry Question(s)

 

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-  How long before we have no privacy at all?

-  What are the technologies that are limiting our privacy?

-  What can we do to prevent from further loss of privacy?

-  Does society care about privacy at all?

My Interest in this Topic

The main interest I have in this topic is my overall concern about it. From the preliminary

research I have done I’ve found that there are a lot of people who aren’t aware of the

consequences that can come from losing privacy. I would like to make the reader of my research

understand exactly what’s at stake and what could happen if something isn’t changed.

Next Steps

For the next part of my research I will be looking further into the technologies and

figuring out how they specifically affect our privacy. I will also be looking for potential solutions

that can allow society to retain their privacy and not have to worry. I will be using resources

from the library as well as going back through the news sites to see if I missed anything.

-Suggestions would be to narrow down your topic into a more specific question, that way you

don’t have too broad of a topic that you will not be able research your topic fully

-Make sure you don’t use contractions in any sort of formal writing 

 

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-Also make sure to use proper grammar especially when talking about major corporations or 

news teams

-Basically just make sure that you might need to redirect your topic and mainly focus on a

specific form of privacy invasion that has to do with today’s techonolgy