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Gonzalo Aguilera
Assignment 04: My Concepts of Privacy
9/20/2015
The Evolution of My Notion of Privacy
Today, the notion of privacy has become a very important subject, especially in the area
of technology. Many of the activities people do in their everyday lives requires some type of
technology, such as doing paperwork, a bank transaction, or shopping. Also, it seems that we live
in a time where the lack of privacy has become part of our lives. The media constantly publishes
news about how peoples personal information is getting tracked. We live in a society that is full
of sharing personal information, which is the common way to interact with others by sharing
opinions, points of view, and feelings through different media. In this way, the notion of privacy
has become more complex than it was 25 years ago because our personal and private information
gets shared either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Privacy has levels of significance in peoples lives. In this way, I believe that the familiar,
social, cultural and geographic environments which people grow up in has a strong impact on
their perception of privacy. Based on my own personal experience and the places that I've lived,
my concept of privacy has evolved. Like everything else life, people change as well and it is
good to share ideas with other people but there are certain things that I believe should kept
private.
One of the main factors that has influenced my notion of privacy is the family
environment in which I grew up. My house was always full of the people, between family and
friends. I think that this environment helped me understand the significance of my own privacy.
In this context, my parents had a very important role in this subject. Although I grew up

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believing that my parents had the same notion of privacy, as I got older I realized that my father
and mother had different perception about privacy. On the one hand, my mother was always
asking questions, and I felt that it was impossible to keep a secret in my house. Perhaps my
mother acted this way because she was an only child. My father was the complete opposite. He
grew up surrounded by many brothers and sisters and that environment defined his notion of
privacy. Although my father liked to be surround people, especially family, he is very private
about his own feeling and thoughts. He always asks me about my problems or how I feel about
something, when he knows it is necessary to ask me. Today, like in the past, he is still very
private about his feelings and thoughts and he respects my privacy as well. I think that in some
way, I tend to imitate him because I tend to be private about my personal stuff. Additionally, I
tend to be very respectful about other peoples privacy too.
Another factor that influenced my notion of privacy was the number of siblings that I
had. I am the youngest of three brothers and two sisters. Growing up with a lot of siblings has
influenced me because I had less control of my privacy. I spent almost of my entire childhood
sharing my room with my brother and we are close in age and only when I became a teenager I
was able to get my own room. I dont member many times feeling alone in my parents house
because as a family we spent a lot time with each other. Definitely having a lot siblings in one
way in or another taught me how to be open and share my feeling and my ideas with others in
this family but my family also appreciated my silence and that I enjoy to be alone with my
thoughts. Today, even though I enjoy being around family or friends, I think that I enjoy being
alone and reading a book with the privacy of my ideas.
Growing up in a Latin culture as a male it is not very private in terms of communication
because males in Latin countries tend to be more open about sharing opinions, ideas and feelings

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with others. For example, a lot of my male friends from Chile dont have a problem expressing
their personal opinions about many subjects, such as politics, jobs, or their personal life. Like my
friends I used to be more open about of expressing my ideas with the people around me in
different situations. In general, people from Latin countries tend not to be very good with their
boundaries and with other peoples boundaries. They tend to ask too many questions. For
example, when they meet someone for first time, they like to share a lot of their personal
information even with people that they do not know well. It is quite common when they meet
new people for their first time to ask several questions about family, children, religion and
money. People expect to get answers from these questions and they wont stop asking questions
until they know what they want to know about that person. A difference of living in the States is
that people seem to have more boundaries about personal matters. Today, anytime, I go to visit
my family in Chile, I have to switch and become more tolerant of people asking a lot of
questions about my family, friends even to people I meet for the first time.
In a religions context, Chile is a Catholic country and the Church has a very strong
presence in which influences peoples behavior. In the context of privacy, Catholics required to
go to church to confess their sins with a priest, although I have never met someone who did that.
Although my parents used to take me to church every Sunday morning in my entire childhood. I
grew up seems people in the church in silence praying.
I do not believe that my religion has influenced my perception of my privacy in a major
way. It may possible that I inherited some elements from my religion in one way or another,
because as an adult I find myself more than one occasion praying, especially when I am faced
with very extreme situation in my life, such as when my mother passed away few years ago. It
seems that there are many habits that involve the privacy our thoughts and that is connected to

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our religion and emotions. In this context my religion and my faith had a strong influence on a
spiritual level.
In terms of the geographical and spatial context, I was born and grew up in an
environment surrounded by mountains, ocean, and desert. I spent most of my life in the North of
Chile in a town called Iquique. I always felt that the landscape surrounding my city invited me to
contemplate it in silence. I used to travel a lot to the desert to contemplate the sunset in the same
way that the ocean has an effect on me. I found those places to be the best locations to think
about different things. This type of landscape was the opposite of my interaction with my family
and friends. I believe that the silence of the desert and the ocean had a strong influence on me
today because when I want to think about important things, somethings rather than call a friend
to talk, I prefer to go for a walk on beach close to my house and think.
I think that from the different stages of my life, since childhood my notion of privacy, has
changed from being very open about sharing my ideas with other people to being more private.
When I was a child I was very accessible and chatty with my family and friends about my ideas
and points of view. During middle school I used to have a lot of friends to talk to and share my
ideas about different stuff. Then, when I became a teenager in high school, the group of people
that I shared my stuff with decreased to a small group. We used to meet on weekends to talk
about life and everything or just to share some problems as a way to express about how we feel
about different things. When I went to college, I was only around a small group of people that I
trusted and talked to about personal things. I became more cautious about what to say or share
with others. Since then, I have been more reserved about my personal life and I just share my
feelings with the people close to me. I still like go for walks especially in places with a lot of
space like the beach to think about stuff.

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I have always been conservative in my attitude towards technology and my privacy.

Although I have Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter accounts, I know what to post or share in
cyberspace. Although it is almost impossible not to get involved in social media because places
like Facebook have become important places in social media for people to connect and
communicate about things that were once done on the phone. I still prefer face to face or phone
communication but I use the webcam as way to communicate with my family. I believe that
technology has become a helpful to connect with people but I am still very conservative with my
privacy.
To conclude, the notion of privacy changed in my case from being more open to a private
and conservative lifestyle. Many aspects of my life vary in how I share my ideas and feelings
with others. My family has had the biggest influence on how I manage my privacy. But, beyond
how I manage my privacy we live in a time that challenges how I want to deal with privacy. The
technology context that I deal with every day presents a new aspect of how I learn to deal with
and understand my privacy