How Social Networking Can Be A Great Opportunity?

Jim Harper, the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch, feels, “People should get smart and learn how to control personal information.” However, at this time, the only way to thoroughly control your personal information is to avoid the internet altogether. Once a web purchase is completed or a post is liked, that data moves beyond the reach of that individual. An identity is created, but the one it identifies has no authority in the matter. The data brokers have carte blanche to handle or pass along information as they please. Truth and privacy become casualties when the only concern is how to make a profit, and there's always a profit to be made. As Alexis Madrigal noted, “Every move you make on the internet is worth some tiny amount to someone.” Individuals should have control over their internet identity after their hands leave the keyboard. The damage done, whether purposeful or unintended, is too great of a risk to let continue. In the meantime, Jim Harper's limited solution should not be ignored. Each individual must be attentive to what data they make available. For now, it is the only power we

Over the past few years, the development of the Internet and the intrusive surveillance capabilities of these technologies have caused privacy to become a major political and social issue for millions of Americans who go online.  Companies employ a variety of tools to gather marketable information on American citizens.  Most of the use of this information is for personalized advertisement and to create databases of target audiences.  While these activities may appear to be nothing more than annoyances for a majority of Americans, there is the hidden danger of the loss of privacy.

With the internet gaining such popularity, privacy has become a thing of the past. People have come to accept that strangers can view personal information about them on social networks such as facebook, and companies and the government are constantly viewing peoples’ activity online for a variety of reasons. The government has attempted to help the consumer regain their privacy online by passing the Consumer Internet Privacy Protection Act of 1997, although it is difficult to enforce and has become outdated with the fast-moving tendency of the constantly changing internet. Some companies including yahoo and google have come under scrutiny about violating

In earlier times, communities were small and intimate. Personal information was preserved in the memories of friends, family, and neighbors, and it was spread by gossip and storytelling. Today, information is spreading through massive electronic record systems and databases. Privacy become very important and growing concern in every country around the world. Modern computing technologies and the Internet have generated the capacity to collect, manipulate, and share massive quantities of data. In this paper, I will be discussing the advantages and disadvantages of public access to citizens’ private data and other topics on the value of digital privacy.

America is an individualized society, where personal privacy is valued. Current exposure is increasing, however, due to technological factors. Those factors include social networking, YouTube, Twitter, and other forms of mass expression. The effects of this increased exposure can range from embarrassment to risks to personal safety on one hand to greater exposure to other cultures and a better understanding of the lives of others.

“Policymakers, on both the national and organizational levels, recognize the importance of regulating privacy in online environments and its potential repercussions for online behavior”(Dmitry 149). Control over public information that is provided to us via the internet would be in violation of the fundamental constitutional foundations of American democracy, freedom of speech, which to many internet users would be considered as the beginning of a totalitarian government motivated by financial interests. “In the cognate-based approach, the notion of control over, and limited access to, one’s personal information emerges as the dominant method of conceptualizing privacy”(Dmitry 151). While the concepts of regulating internet privacy may be perpetuated by mainstream media sources and by lobbyists, the general consensus online would agree that self-regulation is more appropriate than government regulation. Much of the self-regulation has come from government-sponsored ideas that would protect users by education rather than by control.

At this instant, if one remains connected to the internet via smartphone, laptop, smart watch, or any other connected device, that being acts as a source of information for companies to use. People wonder how much spying the government and companies truly conduct in, and along came Edward Snowden in two-thousand-thirteen to expose how much is really tracked. Notably, Tom Geller, author of “In Privacy Law, It’s the U.S. vs. the World”, states, “His 2013 exposé of spying practices revealed the U.S. was secretly collecting protected European data, often via U.S. companies like Facebook” (Gellar 21). The whistleblowing act done by Edward Snowden has internet privacy becoming more of a political issue which is beneficial to the individuals who browse

Prior to the Consumer’s Privacy Bill, consumer data protection in the United States was governed by unproductive mixes of laws that were applicable to prudent economic sectors that provide protection for a small division of consumer personal data in lieu of establishing a precedence of protections through one single law (CDT, n.d.). These practices alone are inadequate for technological standards of the most recent times, where Americans rely on the internet to conduct very personal business. Section five of the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC), which provides opposition to companies participating in unfair and illegal trading practice even provides a limited protection without the Consumer Privacy Bill providing stable security to consumers. However, with the establishment of the Consumer Privacy Bill of Right that single standard is established that extends protection to all data while providing grounds for regulations and laws reducing or even eliminating potential cyber attacks with enhanced

“Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty” is an essay written by Nicholas Carr in 2010 in the Wall Street Journal. He said that there are chances that, “our personal data will fall into the wrong hands” (Carr 438). It means that people’s personal information might drop under the hands of hackers, data aggressors, and stalkers. In addition, Carr believes that “personal information may be used to influence our behavior and even our thoughts in ways that are invisible to us” (Carr 439). It means that the data aggressors misuse people’s information in opposite way or in a wrong way. For example, data aggressors steal the people’s personal information and use that information for their own benefits. Therefore, Carr believes that government should regulate the internet. Unlike Carr, Harper believes that people are responsible for their own information. They should be aware and concerned about potential dangers of posting their personal information on the internet. However, it’s people duty to be aware of its consequences before posting any of their personal

Today, individuals are sacrificing privacy in order to feel safe. These sacrifices have made a significant impact on the current meaning of privacy, but may have greater consequences in the future. According to Debbie Kasper in her journal, “The Evolution (Or Devolution) of Privacy,” privacy is a struggling dilemma in America. Kasper asks, “If it is gone, when did it disappear, and why?”(Kasper 69). Our past generation has experienced the baby boom, and the world today is witnessing a technological boom. Technology is growing at an exponential rate, thus making information easier to access and share than ever before. The rapid diminishing of privacy is leaving Americans desperate for change.

This is an era of massive violations of privacy rights and individual liberties due to the new technologies of surveillance, data mining, electronic monitoring, biometric chips, spamming, hacking, phishing, and security breaches at major private and public institutions. These new technologies make the protection of privacy rights far more difficult than in the pre-electronic past. Given the nature of the Internet, thousands or even millions of people can view these Twitter and Facebook postings in a very short time, and they can quickly go 'viral' and spread globally almost overnight (Owyang and Milliken 2010). Governments collect data on the entire life cycles of individuals, from birth to death, as well as information on marriages, divorces, legal records, financial histories, voting, motor vehicles and property ownership. Those suspected of terrorist or 'subversive' sympathies are subjected to far more intensive covert monitoring and investigation by the federal government, under the provisions of the Patriot Act. Banks, corporations and private organizations in general also collect an immense amount of personal and financial data for credit and marketing purposes. In short, these governmental and private organizations now have considerable power over "individual autonomy and decision making" thanks to these new technologies (Solove, 2006, p. 2).

This article in particular involved several large companies and government agencies that deal with vast amounts of peoples’ private information such as buying habits and personal online activity. Some of the companies involved in this dispute include social media giants like and Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook as well as other huge internet corporations such as Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Apple, and Google. On the federal side of this fiasco includes government organizations like the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The primary issue of discussion includes the perceptively unwarranted mining of people’s information through the use of sites like Facebook and Google. Other issues at hand also

The recent revolutions of the world have changed how individuals live their lives. With the creation of new and advanced technology every era, individuals begin to trust new ways of communicating and storing our personal life. This has caused the Internet and cellular networks to be the newest information banks that all societies trust to keep their personal information safe. With these sources being accessed by people around the world, spy agencies are now looking at these information banks as sources to access the personal information of millions of individuals. With Internet privacy becoming increasingly questionable, the debate arises “Is it ethical for the government to access our personal viral information?” Since gaining access to

A part of the American dream for a lot of people is the right to have privacy. Americans are constantly worrying about the Government taking away personal the personal privacy of citizens. But people may not realize that in society today a person’s privacy is tested when it comes to using the Internet. Although the Internet can be fun and is convenient in many ways, there are many dangers associated with it. Including, but not limited to, Spyware affecting a person’s computer, the threat of credit card theft, the dangers of uploading personal photos onto the Internet, and also the dangers of putting personal information on a social networking site. These actions can cause a person’s personal information to be stolen, money can also be

A wrong use of the personal data can produce a big problem for them, but also can be a huge connotation for the society. It is difficult to control the manipulation of the information, because some data collectors are really hard to be identified. (Bergström, 2015)