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Why give your civil liberties away, when you can pay someone to take them?

It seems privacy is increasingly being traded for convenience and we, as citizens, are becoming more comfortable with it every day.

It starts with the cell phone, which we all have, and yeah- we are aware it can be used to pinpoint our location almost anywhere in the modern world- but we don’t care! Who can be without a cell phone these days? We happily pay our bills every month, and carry them with us everywhere.

Then we have GPS Navigation Systems. Even I have a TomTom and swear by it. GPS allows us to get TO anywhere FROM anywhere, without having to go through the hassle of using a map. Even MapQuest seems inconvenient once you’ve experienced the GPS (a.k.a. small tracking device that can be located by satellites almost anywhere in the world). People buy these little jewels of convenience for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars, and probably always thank the sales person who sold it to them.

Our lives are a series of trade-offs, some worth it, others not. Time for money, money for toys, privacy for convenience…Ultimately we each make our own decisions about which trade-offs we find beneficial, and which we do not. Slowly, we as citizens are selling that choice and we are buying it under the guise of convenience.

If the U.S. government one day told us that we would all be required to wear little bracelets so that satellites could “monitor” our movements, we would riot! No WAY Americans would stand for that sort of invasion of privacy! Unless of course, it can with a cool name like TomTom or had sweet functions, like an mp3 player…

The medical industry in America is quickly undergoing a, currently voluntary, conversion to paperless records. Well, paperless everything. One by one, offices are making the decision to “go electronic” for a number of reasons, mostly to save time and money. In the context of a few offices, electronic record keeping maybe wouldn’t be THAT bad. A few records shared between offices is doing no one any harm. It’s the underlying intention of the process threatens Americans’ right to privacy; a national centralized medical database.

FGCU guest speaker Colin Powell himself, while speaking at the University, briefly mentioned the convenience for patients an electronic, national medical database would offer. The very IDEA makes me shudder.

What we are being told about this idea, is how much EASIER our lives will be. No longer will we need to spend those HORRIBLE four minutes, filling out medical history forms every time we see a new doctor! We could be sick anywhere in the country, seen by any doctor, and within seconds they would have access to our entire history including allergies and current prescriptions.

Like communism, this idea seems great on paper. It is only once we analyze some of the potential problems this sort of system presents, and the trade-off we as citizens give for having it, that the realities of such a system reveal themselves.

While there is no argument that computers make our collective lives infinitely easier, we must keep in mind how unreliable they can sometimes be. Paper records can always be used as a backup. They don’t crash or get accidentally deleted. The information on them does not get “mis-entered”; there are no “typos”, and there is zero chance of paper records being “hacked” into.

When mistakes are made on the computer, and there is no paper backup, it becomes difficult to set things right. When it comes to medicine, a simple “typo” that tells a doctor someone IS NOT allergic to something when they are can be life threatening. A mis-entered diagnosis could result in months of fighting with insurance companies who may not cover a “pre-existing condition” you never had!

Though cell phones, and GPS Navigation systems, and devices like them DO in someways invade the privacy of citizens, they are optional “luxuries” that individuals choose to include or exclude in their lives. The electronification of the medial industry is a trend that is being sold to us now as “convenience”, but how long before we are required to buy it?

What right, by the way, does a government have to know the medical histories of it’s citizens? What would a government do with that sort of information?

While some feel that the convenience of an electronic medical system trumps this concern for privacy, we should always offer the individual the right to decide what to disclose and to whom.

For those in support of centralization for convenience, consider the consequences this line of thinking will have on future Americans. If we do not protect the privacy of our medical histories, are we giving permission for other aspects of our lives to be centrally for “easy access” in the future?

As citizens we can make our voices heard, and speak out against this attempted invasion of our privacy, by collectively protesting medical offices that embrace this system. By insisting on paper records, at least as an optional alternative, we can protect our own civil liberties, and those of future Americans.

Originally Published in EagleNews 09-05-2007