Privacy

The notions of privacy and confidentiality are highly tied with the new media because the information flows so fast and freely. Anyone might get the chance to view your personal information or intimate thoughts. Google, Facebook, Twitter and some other networking cites collect our information about us everyday, which they deploy them to the advertiser to gain profits. For example, a family photo that captured by a smart phone and uploaded to the social networks, the persons in this family photo' privacy is at risk. The family photo supposed to be inaccessible to anyone, but now anyone on the internet can see this photo and someone might just predict my hair loss referencing my family photo (Reed, 2011). Another example will be the big data brokers, like Acxiom, they have developed sophisticated tools that allow them to know everything about you and sell these data to all kinds of companies that want to know our habits, sexual orientation or our finances (Nocera, 2014). To live in this digital age, none of our secret will be a secret is we like to share. We should watch out everything we do online to avoid trap that might benefit others in inappropriate way. Sometimes you think it's very safe to post anything on your social networking cites because you think you only share them with your trust-able friends, however, hackers might access to your personal photo easily and everything you posted will be a weapon to turn against you. Ownership, privacy, reputation and decision makings are so intertwined that we might not have the control of everything happened online.





Work Cited:
Reed, Daniel. "Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations" May 11, 2011. <http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/108232-information-privacy-changing-norms-and-expectations/fulltext>

Nocera, Joe. "The Wild West of Privacy" Feb 24 , 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/opinion/nocera-the-wild-west-of-privacy.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=