Blog: Privacy

Privacy and confidentiality are extremely important to consider when discussing new media and technology. We have a sense that others should have limited access to our sense of selves and that we should be allowed some privacy about our personal information. We have the sense that if we choose not to live in the public eye, that decision will be respected by others. The problem is that with the Internet everything is available to anyone. If you put anything online you are saying it is available to the world. You are putting whatever information out there for anyone to have access to and you have to keep that in mind when using new media and social networking sites. We have the right to control our identity and image from unauthorized use. Yet, despite these protections, our privacy is compromised by a wide-ranging collection of data that is manipulated in various ways. It is aggregated and mined and sometimes, people are identified via these collections and investigations. Most of all, it is shared with a variety of others via commerce in which massive amounts of data change hands for profit. Sometimes that data is released unintentionally. It is almost always exchanged outside of our conscious awareness, without our direct permission or even partial understanding of the uses to which it is put.

It is extremely important that people understand what privacy and confidentiality mean in relation to technology and new media. Privacy concerns with social networking services involve the right of assuring that people's privacy is kept somewhat intact and that they do have some control over who is viewing what they put on the Internet. There is, unfortunately, an overall lack of privacy on social media. There are sites that encourage personal disclosure and there are ways to keep your personal information to a certain degree private. With that being said, it is very had to keep everything that you put online to remain unidentifiable. Social networks rely on its users' lack or perceived value in their data. Users need to understand the value of privacy. New media allows users to publish details about themselves and their lives. However, some of the information revealed in these networks really should remain private and shouldn't be published on the Internet. Users often publish detailed person information, which can cause all sorts of problems. This allows an opportunity for identity thieves, scam artists, debt collectors, and stalkers to use information that people themselves have voluntarily provided in ways harmful for the person who provided the information in the first place.

It is essential that people understand the repercussions of posting personal information online. It is of course a personal decision, but I don't think a lot of people understand completely what it means to put information on the Internet. It is a serious thing because privacy is really limited in the online world. New media has opened up a different outlook on confidentiality and how we approach privacy in general. Although the Issues of online privacy has been a problem for the general public for a long time it has started to grow rapidly due to technology, specifically due to new media. The devices we have accessible to us today easily enables anyone to make content and share it with just one click of a button. The amount of personal content available online is has been increasing rapidly in the last years. Posting Content such as picture and video arise new privacy concerns due to their context revealing details about the physical and social context of the subject. It is really important for us to be educated about what it means to have privacy with new media and how it differs from the real-time world.