Week 12 - Essay

Damages to the technological world: Lack of privacy on the Internet

The Internet has evolved with rapid fashion over the last decade. This massive growth has generated new apprehension in regards to guarding the privacy of users. As Cudil and Murphy (2000) points out, further development in online security is required. The ways in which people make themselves known in cyberspace must be protected as well as respected. The media continuously publish cases concerning violations of privacy, and how this affects the people involved. Given the substantial flow of personal information throughout the Web, breaches to this privacy can be damaging in several ways. This essay will explore the social networking phenomena and the privacy issues that follows, as well as relating these problems back to networking sites such as Facebook. The question being; are we endangering ourselves by providing complete strangers with sensitive information? Finally, this paper will discuss the implications this lack of privacy has on our technological society.

Many attempts have been made in regards to defining privacy. Burgoon et al. (1989) once stated that privacy concerns an individual right to influence how, in what time and to what degree information about oneself will be unveiled to another person. Further, a social network refers to certain people being tied together on different levels of relationships or that are important to each other in some way. (Wellman, 1996; Lange, 2008)

According to Gross and Aquisti (2005) the social networking phenomena has become “mass adopted”. Although goals between various sites are different, social networking share the basic principles of online communication and interaction. Compared to offline networks, online versions can classify hundreds of thousands of individuals as friends, or friends of friends. This way they gain access to personal information, even though the minimum level of being in somebody’s network is very low. New technology facilitates uncomplicated communication techniques that help people form and maintain these so called “weak ties” online. (Gross & Aquisti, 2005)

Furthermore, dangers regarding this form of information revelation must be acknowledged. Liu and Mae (2005) used the term “re-identification” when describing how people often re-use the same material (e.g. pictures and demographics) over several networking sites, and this way creating a window for others to recognise them. Another problem is the fact that regardless of recommendations from the hosting sites, people are willing to disclose large amounts of information to large groups of people (Pratt & Conger, 2009). In some cases we reveal sensitive information to complete strangers instead of our closest friends. This type of disclosure is very common on Facebook, a site now involving over 500 million people. This massive network of online networks produces a vast amount of information crossing between its users.

Another major online security issue is the amount of information that becomes public without peoples knowledge. Over the past few years several cases of distress and even deaths have been reported due to sensitive information that became public knowledge. Early October this year, The Daily Mail published a story on a female Duke University student from the United States. She created a list involving intimate details of 13 male students with whom she had engaged in sexual relationships and emailed it to three of her friends. The list spread like wildfire and after a short period of time it was distributed all over the globe. The female student had no desire of promoting this information on a global level, and quickly went out and apologised for the incident. Even so, the offended males may suffer psychological consequences.

Furthermore, not too long ago a boy named Tyler Clementi tragically took his own life after fellow university students decided to stream a video displaying Clementi with another male engaging in sexual activities in his bedroom. After the incident, the young student jumped off the George Washington Bridge to his death. (The News of Today, 2010)

Privacy implications in regards to social networking sites depends on various factors such as how easy the information can be identified, possible recipients and usages of the information. Even though the information is anonymous, it can still provide the reader with enough material to identify its owner. The dark side of the Web, consisting of hackers and those who will use sensitive information to cause harm and distress, are playing a large role in why Internet privacy is such a contentious issue amongst users. However, even though computer crimes such as identity theft and collecting people’s credit card information are serious issues, the greater problem can quite possibly be ourselves. When talking about privacy and information protection on Facebook, there have been several changes over the past years. As Danah Boyd points out, severe implications can be caused by the fact that people do not adapt well to change, or that they do not comprehend the actual changes. When the Facebook team recently asked their consumers to re asses their privacy settings, the majority chose the default option, which was “everyone”. Facebook users went through the pop-up menu without considering the consequences of their choices, and the result was that even more of their information became open to the public (Boyd, 2007).

In conclusion, the shift towards a highly user generated web suggests that the social networking phenomenon is here to stay and the privacy will remain an issue. Even though several sites are constantly working on improving their security, the general public should also consider the material they choose to reveal. Some information is not only sensitive for some individuals, but might also cause a great deal of harm. Whether or not it is the consumers or the cooperation’s holding the responsibility remains to be unanswered, but what can be said is that some drastic changes in online networking should be made.

References

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1318575/Duke-University-alumni-Karen-Owens-sex-list-internet-sensation.html

http://thenewsoftoday.com/tyler-clementi-commits-suicide-after-filmed-having-sex-by-molly-wei-and-dharun-ravi-at-rutgers/2918/

Information Revelation and Privacy in online Social Networks; Gross R., & Acquisti (2005)

http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/papers/privacy-facebook-gross-acquisti.pdf

Consumer online privacy: Legal and ethical issues; Eve M Caudill; Patrick E Murphy, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing; Spring 2000; 19, 1;

http://web.rollins.edu/~jmorrison/docs/Com%20Ethics/Readings/web%20privacy%20policies2.pdf

Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube, Patricia G. Lange (2008)

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~apidduck/CS432/Assignments/YouTube.pdf

H. Liu and P. Maes. Interestmap: Harvesting sosial network profiles for recommendations. In Beyond Personalization - IUI 2005, January 9, San Diego, California, USA, 2005.

http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:u9A73-kKGNoJ:scholar.google.com/+Interestmap:+Harvesting+social+network+profiles+for+recommendations&hl=en&as_sdt=2000

Social networking sites: Definition, History and Scholarship; Boyd, Ellison (2007)

http://www.guilford.edu/about_guilford/services_and_administration/library/libguide_images/boyd.pdf

Without permission: Privacy on the line, Pratt & Conger (2009)

http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2007/119/

Course Evaluation

Overall I enjoyed New Communication Technologies. I found that there was a lot of interesting topics and I have learned a great deal.

Regarding the lectures, I thought they were informative and organised. Even though some of the material was a bit hard to consume during the 50 mins lecture, it always helped reviewing the lecture notes after when writing about it in the blog. In addition, the lectures had several visual aids and that makes it both easier to follow and more interesting.

In regard to the blogs, I found this part of the course somewhat time consuming. Most of the tutorial tasks were challenging, and at times there was a lack of communication regarding what the task was about. However, I am confident that the blog entries will help me considerably when it comes to exam revision, and the tutorial tasks were all very clever and enjoyable as soon as you received some clues on how to attack them.

To conclude, it is a good course on an interesting field. It takes time, but will not regret the effort when it comes to exam time.