The past couple of years have seen increasing numbers of news stories and scandals involving members of the public’s privacy being compromised. As we immerse ourselves ever-deeper in a digital world where much of what we do is recorded - by CCTV, web server logs, computerised medical records and much more - the opportunities for these compromises to occur increase.

Most of the privacy-related stories that have made the news in recent times fall into one of the following categories:

1. Human Error: While computers get better at recording what we do, humans are no less likely to make mistakes than in the past. Therefore, we regularly hear of CDs full of medical records being dropped in hospital carparks, government laptops being left on trains and the like.  Take a look at this example concerning HSBC, for example.

2. Businesses and organisations being slow to adapt: Privacy policies at many businesses and organisations are simply not up to scratch. Hence government departments have lost public records in the post when CDs containing data have failed to reach their destination. Also fitting into this category is Google Streetview, a Google Maps feature which is coming to the UK soon.  Darren Waters at the BBC has more on that here.

3. Courts favour commercial interests over privacy: Just look at the Youtube case yesterday as an example. Viacom will be getting all the records of every video every Youtube user has ever looked at (although I like this suggestion of how Google could rebel against the decision).

4. We give our privacy away freely: Many people simply aren’t aware enough of privacy issues when it comes to social networking and will happily expose personal details on sites like Myspace and Facebook. What’s more, how many members of the public are aware of how much data they give away when they search using Google?

So - what can we do in the face of all this? Run away and hide up a mountain away from prying digital eyes and live the life of a cave-dwelling hermit? Fight for tighter privacy laws?

My personal response to all of this is different. I believe that idea of personal privacy (as we currently understand it) is dying. While laws could be put in place to better protect it, the digital world is constantly changing and will grow its way around any laws that get put in its way. In a world where information is freely available anywhere, personal privacy may no longer have the same meaning we’ve been used to. We may have to get used to much of our personal data being ‘out there’.

We’ll be exposed, naked, and we might just have to get used to it. Technology isn’t going to slow down any time soon. Just as humans had to adapt to many changes in the past, from the Ice Age to the Industrial Revolution, maybe we need to modify our definition of ‘private’ in the 21st Century.

[Image credit: rpongsaj on Flickr]