Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security." Today we may agree or disagree with Franklin's quote, but we have one thing in common: just like Franklin, we continue to see freedom versus security as a zero-sum game, in which one can only gain at the expense of another and where the two absolutely cannot coexist. However, this is not necessarily the case. There doesn't necessarily have to be a trade-off between privacy and security; the right balance is one in which neither security nor privacy are penalized by the presence of both in our daily lives. The main reason we continue to share Franklin's opinion is primarily because most governments, either having too little or too much power, fail to provide citizens with either privacy or security. They provide only one or, in some extreme cases, neither. However, there are some good examples of how the government can, by having just enough power and creating a system with checks and balances, give its citizens the freedoms they are entitled to, while making them feel safe. The paper will cover two aspects of the privacy-vs-security issue. The first concerns general civil liberties, where privacy means the freedom to make personal (private) choices in our homes, to control our daily lives and to decide with whom we share information about us – information about our emotions. , attitudes, behaviors, decisions and future events. The second aspect concerns privacy and security on the Internet. As we live in a technological age, the Internet has become an inseparable part of our... medium of paper......king of this fact. However, we still like to think of what we do on the Internet as our own business, and we don't like governments searching our Gmail accounts or recording our video chats. Somehow it doesn't seem wrong when Amazon does it – after all, it's us who voluntarily create an account knowing that Amazon will have insight into what we buy, what we want to buy and what we need, even when we ourselves are unaware to need it. The difference here is that we know how and what information Amazon will store and use. We also believe that this information will be used to our advantage, and when we have this attitude, we are more willing to provide the necessary information. On the other hand, we are usually unable to understand why the government would need our data in the first place and then what purposes it would use it for..