Culture of fear
The amount of fear in which mainstream America lives is utterly distressing to me. While not anything new or even profound, it reared its ugly head again to me today at work.
If you type your landline phone number into Google, it will return with your name, address — all the information that you have listed for yourself in the phone book. As with everything, it will also give you the opportunity to print out a map of the address. This is called a reverse lookup, and it has been available to people through the decades. One just used to have to call 411 to get it. (Of course, they’d have to create their own map, as well.)
Wanted to know where a person lived and had their last name? Just pull out the phone book.
This isn’t new. This isn’t privacy invasion. This isn’t a reason to sound the alarm. But just this morning I received a request to pull someone’s contact information off the synod Web site because they didn’t want that information on the Internet. So instead, now all a person has to do is call the synod office to receive it. Or look in our printed directories. But they can’t get it from our Web site, because heaven forbid someone with ill intentions searches for it and finds it there.
And what if they search in the phone book? Or call 411 for a reverse lookup?
Information is not inherently bad; nor is it inherently good. Its merely information. In the wrong hands, no matter where it is obtained, information can be used for bad reason.
Fear of information, I’ve found, is a generational difference. Those of us who were born post-1980 don’t have as much fear of what is available on the Internet. Makes sense given our upbringing with unfetted access to the Internet pre-psychos. (Or was it, really?) People born before then, though, the notion of Big Brother permeates the fear. Fueled by our governmental officials (who have ill intentions, I might add), this fear is manipulated in a way to create the illusion that privacy is possible — even plausible. But they’re the good folks. No need to fear the government, they want us to believe.
The enemy is not Google. The enemy is, as it has always been, sick and twisted people. They’re not leaving any time soon, but they seem to be calling the shots now. Grr-eat.
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Daniel Ross-Jones serves as Minister for Youth & Young Adults at First Congregational Church of Palo Alto, United Church of Christ. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for a time still measured in months, he is frequently getting lost and discovering treasures of a landscape very different from his Upper Midwestern roots. Green Jello Hotdish is a blog exploring the intersections of his days. 
