Everyday, I get junk mail.
I am sure all of you do too but there is a pattern to it that I discovered as the method behind the madness.
Everyday, some one or the other sends you spam mail that somehow lands in your primary mailbox simply because you have unknown to yourself, chosen to see “all mails” desperately as you might miss an invitation to Rashtrapati Bhavan or the White House if you are are not watchful!
Bad thing is that you hardly notice and realise that you need to unsubscribe and you don’t have the energy mostly. Or if you do, you fail to keep track of it? When you do “Unsubscribe” finally, you may again “Re-subscribe” They always plant a small unnoticeable button in fine print so small that you press it again by mistake to get out of that page and Lo! before you realise it, you are back subscribing!
This privacy thing is a myth in the digital world of virtual reality. I have tried to figure out how it would work in real life as an equivalent. Suppose some totally random stranger opens your gate, walks into your house then pushes open the door and sits in your drawing room. Whenever you do get to see him or her or mostly even when you do not as well, he or she politely says “I just stopped by and dropped in to meet you.” Uninvited!
“I’m not sure if you want me here. But I think you will be interested in what I have to tell you. But if you are not ok I am ready to be gone forever if you click on this button. I will go out of you door and out of your life forever but in case you change your mind, just call me back (Click this button) and I will turn back and return through the gate and the door to enter your house again any number of times again. Then of course you will learn to live with me as you cannot think of living without me!”
This happens on a daily basis in our lives. What is physical privacy? If people invaded your personal spaces every day without even asking you, how would you feel about it?
Well in the virtual world, it is becoming daily reality. “Virtual reality” you might call it as a harmless intangible occurrence but the fact is that people send unsolicited mails like “begging syndicates at traffic lights” to people all over the world on all the databases they can find and then when you have received the mail then it becomes your prerogative or rather your headache to stop others from invading you. You decide to at least, read the contents before deleting or even unsubscribing. That is enough to open the floodgates for others. Then they are many other “junky” beggars around the street corner waiting to enter your house as now they see it as your interest that you actually opened a mail! Through the gate they come and then the door and into the sitting room area or the drawing room and perhaps even in the bedroom till you drive them out. I rest my case that “Privacy” doesn’t exist anymore. One friend was so horrified at the permissive film clip that he decided to see how far they go so that he might warn them about content. That was enough for him to get a torrent of a downpour of sleazy soft porn till he almost died many years later! Like a friend of mine said the other day “privacy” is a word that you probably only come across in a spelling bee competition. I said to him “Not even there because it’s so easy to spell and so difficult to find – that’s privacy!”.