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To what extent should any one person expect privacy while in public? Do the norms of society allow a person to be private while in public?

Lets look at a couple scenarios. Your sitting at an airport working on your laptop while waiting for your plane to arrive. Can you expect that no one will be looking over your shoulder from the seats behind you? How about on the airplane itself? do you have to have business or first class to expect that?

Public privacy has been forced on all of us with the advent of the cell phone for certain. When your on public transportation or in the store, we hear plenty of people having a conversation with the husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, broker, bookie, drug dealer. And those talking on the phone expect us all to not listen. The other day I was in a grocery store and a lady was on the phone with customer service for something and there was no way I couldn't listen.

When several people are complaining about the government invading thier personal freedoms, listening to overseas calls, viewing our library book records, and so on, why are they complaining when they take the call from Billy Joe Bob on the Metro and start yammering about their latest marijuana crop?

So lets now bring it home now. I grew up in a family of seven, two brothers, two sisters and Mom and Dad (yes, three girls in one household... Danger, Will Robinson, Danger) Now that we're all older and lead desperate lives, we get along fabulously, but when we were younger, privacy didn't extend to clothing, rooms, diaries or anything else for that matter. It was nearly impossible. I was the unlucky draw of being the computer geek of the three of us girls and it always fell to me to fix my sisters mistakes. It goes without saying that quite often I would be fixing a computer and view or witness something that they would obviously prefer to remain private. I remained discreet for them out of my own personal code. But all too often they would get angry with me or even snap at me if I glanced at what they were doing just to make sure they weren't messing something up. I wasn't being nosey, I was merely trying to do preventative measures so I wouldn't have to work harder in the future.

So to what extent do we give privacy away to our technicians, government, or to the public? We do it all the time and here's the ticket, we expect discretion. We expect it from all of the above. It is now in a norm of society to expect anyone hearing out inner mosts to ignore it, pretend they didn't hear it, and leave us alone.

We also have to learn that the technician, the government and quite often the public are not trying to be nosey but trying to make sure we're not out to blow up a building, kill ourselves, or maybe they are just trying to help.

Thank you for listening and if I rambled incoherently, what can I say, try and figure out what I really meant not what I actually typed.