OXFORD, Miss. (WTVA) -- In the last 30 years, psychologists say society has changed dramatically.
For example, people tend to be much more desensitized to violence because of its prevalence in movies and television, even video games.
But experts say we're also becoming numb to something else, too: privacy, whether it's ours or someone else’s.
For celebrities, the constant chatter of camera shutters is nothing new; it comes with the territory.
They’re famous. They expect to be in the limelight all the time.
But when those photos are a little closer to home, experts say they represent something else entirely: the erosion of our privacy.
"If you see someone do something embarrassing -- if I go to The Square in Oxford and see someone stumble outside of a bar, I've got a camera in my pocket," technology consultant Will Stone said. "I can film it [and] I can put it on Facebook, all without them having any idea it happened."
And it’s part of our culture now, they say.
A 2011 Pew Research survey found 73 percent of Americans used their phones for taking photographs.
The line between what's public and what's private is a thin one. For example, there's no expectation of privacy for someone who can be seen from a public road. If someone videotaped you from a public street, it's perfectly legal.
Because it's public, one also doesn't have to ask anyone’s permission to be photographed.
But an invasion doesn’t stop at photos or video, either.
Social media has changed how much we know about each other -- and read about each other -- every day.
"It becomes more and more acceptable for people to post everything online. Some people, you can see when they wake up, when they eat, where they've been, who they've been with…everything they've done throughout the day, and they document it willingly," Stone said.
To millions of users of Facebook and other forms of social media, that’s a typical day. But to others, it’s an information overload.
"I think that sometimes people get to where they share so much of their lives with other people and sometimes you get to where there's nothing sacred or there's nothing special to keep from people that matter most to you," Oxford resident Stephanie Houston said. "Everybody sees it all."
"It just became something that wasn't important to me anymore," Ole Miss junior Sanford Moore said. "With the privacy thing, it shouldn't be something you have to worry about. It should be in the backseat, that's not important."
Many say their expectations of privacy have changed drastically not only because of today’s technology, but how connected people are becoming and how they end up relying on it more and more.
"You've got people sharing things that they would not tell their friends or family and they're sharing it with complete strangers, and openly doing so and willingly doing so without being prompted by anybody else," Stone said. "It lends to peoples' alibis, it lends to lots of things. It's a very free-flowing system of information and people don't understand the repercussions behind it."
Stone calls it simply a lack of responsibility. But is there a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to those sites?
"People post their information on Facebook to be shared by others. And you can't complain a whole lot about privacy issues if you're gonna be putting it out there as fair game," Corinth attorney Bill Odom said. "There's a degree of responsibility that goes along with the poster of the information as well as the viewers of the information."
In essence, Odom says we are guilty of giving up our own sense of privacy by the information we post, and it’s not going to change.
"Technology is always ahead of our moral ability to deal with it and our legal ability to deal with it. So we have to build into our morals and legal system the control of resources with what technology will provide for us," Odom said. "We will need further definition by what's allowed, and what's crossing the line."
"It absolutely changes the dynamics of society as a whole, because, once we've gone through this door, we can't go back," Stone said. "And it's only from this point on going to be more invasive and more, possibly destructive. I've got a GPS receiver in my pocket. How much more -- short of an implant -- how much more invasive can you get?"
Many students interviewed for this story said they actually dropped their Facebook accounts because they wanted more privacy.
But for those who do post -- not just on Facebook, but other forms of social media -- the one thing that keeps being echoed is to be careful.
And there are ways to safeguard how your information is used on these social media sites. Bottom line, though: your privacy’s only as sound as the information you share.
