I hate cell phone companies, but my phone falls into a category of my personal belongings comparable to vital organs. It’s a struggle a lot of us deal with; we pay obscene monthly rates to keep our phones running, and get hung out to dry if we go over our monthly allowance by one second or text letter. When it comes to cell phone providers, I’ve been around the block, and the kicker is – each one is just as bad as the next. I have an ongoing tolerate-hate relationship with my cell phone provider, and I’m probably not alone. But a woman from Toronto (not myself, surprisingly) has managed to take this hatred to a whole new level.
Gabriella Nagy is currently suing Rogers for a butt-kicking $600 000 for breach of contract and invasion of privacy. What in the world could Rogers have done? Sold her personal information to third party advertising companies? No silly, that’s Facebook’s shtick. Charged her for a plan she didn’t have? No, that was someone else. What Rogers did was combine Nagy’s phone and internet services with her husband’s newly purchased cell phone onto one bill. Oh the humanity! Not that big of a deal, until her husband discovered multiple calls made to an unknown number… well unknown to him. After a bit of ‘detective work’ on his part, he managed match the number to a man with whom his wife was having an affair. He walked out on his wife and two kids soon after. Overcome by this disparaging situation that she apparently did not see coming, Nagy was ‘overly emotional’ at her workplace, which included crying on multiple occasions and snapping at coworkers. Needless to say, she was fired a few weeks later, leaving her royally up the creek.
Now any Hallmark card will tell you that this is probably the point where you should pull up your socks and get your act together, but what does Nagy do? Blame Rogers for the whole thing by smacking them in the face with a lawsuit! Rogers disagrees with the accusation; a spokesman explains, “We cannot be responsible for the personal decisions made by our customers.” The most intelligent response to this I can think of is, “Well freaking DUH.” Calling this a legitimate accusation is like being able to hold your cell phone provider responsible for your Friday night drunk dials. What I find slightly ridiculous, or rather, the more outrageous of the two, is the ‘invasion of privacy’ accusation.
This phenomenon has been several years in the making, but now more than ever it seems people as a whole are blurring the definition of ‘privacy’. Any anthropology major can tell you that modern technology minimizes the need for human-to-human interaction and allows for people to essentially isolate themselves, but it seems now that we’re currently contradicting ourselves completely. Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs, and a host of other forums allow people to literally broadcast every minute of their lives to whoever is willing to watch and listen. What people are apparently forgetting, however is that the internet is everywhere. This isn’t 1995 anymore, boys and girls. Even grandma is online now! Is it a little outrageous and inconsiderate that because of Facebook selling information that third party, advertising firms now know your birthday, address and favorite type of cheese? I’d say so, but weren’t you the one who posted it online in the first place?
The term ‘social pendulum’ gets thrown around a lot in attempts to describe trends of social behaviour. Within the past few decades or so, the general public as a whole has gone back and forth from being reserved and restricted, to very unfiltered and in your face. Nowadays, it seems that pendulum is swinging in every single conceivable direction at once. People aren’t afraid to publish every single minute detail of their lives, but then whine, complain and point fingers when they get caught with their pants down, be it figuratively or literally. I’m afraid to say that ‘privacy’ is getting confused with ‘common sense’. The only problem with that is you can’t sue someone for invasion of common sense, regardless of whose lacking it.
It’s truly amazing how much people are willing to share in such an unrestricted public forum while still exhibiting a true paranoia of someone harvesting every single personal detail of their life. Someone will publish their exact location online several times a day, but then lose sleep at night because they’re afraid that Google knows where they live. Perhaps its time that we stop relying on our computers to be our mental filters and start using our heads instead. It’s ok, just put your Smartphone down, I don’t need to know what you had for lunch.
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