In the good old days: What privacy?

In the good old days all we worried about was Big Brother government watching us, wrote Maria Puente for USA Today But now, she said, we have to contend with folks who are using camera phones.

The problem is that these folks upload to the Internet visual records of just anyone's irresponsible moments. "Here in YouTube world, whether you're a celebrity or a nobody, privacy can be a disappearing luxury, thanks to the technology in every pocket. ... In the old days, kids would go on spring break, get drunk, take off their clothes, and few people would know. Now those kinds of pictures flicker 24/7 on the Internet ..."

But this is where USA Today and Maria need to be reminded that "the old days" is a relative term. In my "old days" - in small-town Ohio - there were no spring breaks where parents would finance their college kids' drunken irresponsibility in some far-off state.

That didn't stop drunken irresponsibility, of course. The difference is that most people didn't make damned fools of themselves in public. Most did it in private.

In the old days parents were watching their kids. So were the neighbors. So were the old people who hung out at the post office. Do it in public and everyone who populated your part of the world knew - and they let you know they knew. This is privacy?

That's exactly why, in the old days, public displays of annoying behavior weren't common, as they are today. For those of us who desperately want to - but can't - ignore people pushing their insipidity in our faces, this new technology, cell phones in particular, is a good thing. It may inspire them to perform behind locked doors, as in the good old days.