Technology Is Too Invasive, Lacks Transparency, And Must Be Restricted

Privacy has become a prominent topic in academic and social debate throughout the country. In “Term of Service” by Jacob Silverman, Silverman argues that American citizens today are unaware that their private information is often shown and are no longer safe from the public eye. After all, the integration of social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter has made it impossible to keep anything private. Sharing life events on social media has become the new social norm in the United States. However, this new trend has left the online community with a false sense of security, leaving them venerable against data mining, profiling, and unknown surveillance issues by third party miners across the country. With no end to this threat, how can causal social media users defend themselves without any assistants? The federal government should adopt stronger privacy laws like they have in Europe. They should come up with a digital bill of reforms to help better protect the online community, better inform the public about data mining threats, and companies should get government approval for any data retrieval before they are used for financial gains.

Sergey Brin noted, “Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines, unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.” Nicholas Carr’s essay challenges this assertion. Nicholas Carr believes even though there are multiple search engines, “the faster we surf across the Web-the more links we click and pages we view-the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.” This topic elicits such strong responses because technology is a part of our everyday lives. Technology is only becoming more advanced and will continue to be a source of debate for all who use it.

So many users of the internet blindly browse and post on these sites without any thought to the online identity they are creating for themselves. Shares, tweets, hashtags, likes, and comments all combine to make up an amalgamation of marketable information. In November of 2016, an average of six thousand tweets were made per second, and ninety-five million Instagram posts were made per day (Sayce; Parker). Facebook “has become the largest database of personal information ever collected,” says Richard, and Facebook takes advantage of this. With almost two billion users, Facebook has no shortage of information to gather (Sparks). They do this mainly for targeted advertising. There is no small profit to be made in this. In 2011 Lori Andrews wrote, “Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85% of it's total revenue.” However, Facebook and other internet corporations also relay data gathered on users to the

These extremely large data sets may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations relating to human behavior and interaction. These analysesaffect us on day to day basis positively and negatively and the legality of how this information is collected and the laws that apply may be unclear. Both with or without users' knowledge, consumer personal data is collected from every daily, digital activity; from purchases, web searches, amazon searches, browsing history, and phone use. This data is generated, and then downloaded and stored. [15] Companies can then use this data to create "data sets" or large files of users' data to produce customer profiling. This data can also be used by police, the governmental bodies, scientists, businesses, military, and other industries where occasional breaches of data are expected .[16] Breaches and leaks of personal information including phone calls, credit card information, home address, and personal phone numbers are examples of information that is logged and stored by these corporations while making "data sets". Much of this information is being processed and sold to marketers for the purpose of marketing their products. This information is stored digitally and in some cases, regardless of the security of the information being stored, there are risks of unauthorized parties

Technology has easily become one of the worlds most used and popular inventions. Especially in this time and for the young adults of today’s world. We use it in basically every aspect of our lives. At work, at home, at school, and probably most of all in our social lives technology is always around. There are websites for everything, cell phones that can DO anything, and other pieces of technology that aid us through our lives. Everywhere we turn there is technology. It’s hard to escape it. Items such as television 's, computers, cell phones, even the microwave and that electric tooth brush you use is technology. Even though technology has its many positive influences in everyday life, it also has its bad influences. One of the most controversial topics when it comes to the topic of technology is the invasion of our privacy. How can something that is supposed to make our lives so much easier, actually make it so much harder? With the levels of technology, we have today, along with the internet and all of which the internet consumes, our privacy is basically non-existent. In the novel, The Circle, written by Dave Eggers, it is evident that with the uprising of technology, it is nearly impossible to have privacy and it affects our daily lives. It is not often that you come across someone who doesn’t have a cell phone of computer and it apart of some type of social media program where they interact with people. While social media is not the only aspect of technology that

At first I agreed wholeheartedly that Facebook sells their clients’ information to businesses and potentially the government itself, after all Google is known to do the same with their search engine. However after I thought and analyzed the language he uses to describe how Facebook uses their “transparency”, I realize that he may very well be overblowing the situation.

The privacy compliance recommends that companies like Facebook should adopt a comprehensive privacy program that is reasonably designed to protect the privacy and security to prevent predictable risks. Another important idea is to abide by the Federal Trade Commission’s rules about keeping their advertising from being misleading and deceptive. Also, an opt-in consent form must be provided to the consumers that their data will be kept private. Overall, any type of changes a company possesses should be disclosed clearly to the

How would you feel if I told you that I know almost everything there is to know about you – from your occupation to the brand of toothpaste you use, from your IQ to your culinary tastes, and so on – even though you have never met me, and possibly were not even aware of my existence? Most people would immediately state that they would feel violated, stripped of their individuality. Yet millions of people browse the Net day after day, blissfully ignorant of the fact that that they are always being monitored by someone to some degree. By selling you items and/or services, Amazon.com knows your reading preferences; your favorite online grocery store knows what kind of toothpaste you prefer; your university knows

Lets look deeper into the situation. An article written in may 2017 states that Facebook shares personal data with the police 80% of the time even without a legal warrant. Bow this is the stuff that is scary, all these “law” enforcers have to do is ask and most social media platforms are willing to give out the information that you put out there. Typically it is only used on criminals and suspects but still, the power that these higher authorities use to take away normal citizens rights is out of control and cones with uneasy

“If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?,” asked by Andrew Pole’s colleagues. In today’s day and age of technology, data mining can be easily used to compile huge capacities of data that is validated to calculate patterns of the data from the information such as name, address, date of birth, credit card numbers, and social security numbers that people have submitted to the Internet through purchases, advertising, and profiles everyday. Although data mining seems harmless, it allows companies to gather information to improve the business by making ethical decisions; therefore, this can raise concerns with privacy and security of the person and/or their personal information that

As we’ve moved further into the twenty-first century, our world and society has been immersed into the digital world. With this digitization of our culture we have created a new resource, data. Data has become king in the Age of Intelligence, it fuels most of what technology companies use to make money. Companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, ect. have leveraged their vast amounts of data generated by the millions of internet users to better advertise and attract more users. Surprisingly most of this data collection is created and aggregated unbeknownst to the users. This is where the problems start to show themselves. When users are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, as estimated by IBM,(https://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/what-is-big-data.html),

Facebook is a well know social networking site that has taken all over the world with over 500 million people using the site. Social networking sites such as Facebook share information about the user over the Internet, where it can be freely accessed by anyone. This is where issues of privacy to the individual arise. As of July 2010 Facebook has more than 500 million active users, Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. As of December last year, Facebook called its 500 million users to review their privacy settings at the launch of its new user control tools which allow the user to control their information easily depending on

The amount of data created by people every year has gone up significantly in the past few years. In 2015, there was 7.9 zettabytes of data created worldwide, and that amount is expected to grow to 35 zettabytes by 2020 (Lee, 2016). The increased popularity of smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices in recent years have contributed to the growing amount of data being created. Businesses see this data as a way to improve their fortunes and are coming up with ways to profit from this data. To obtain the data in order to utilize it, businesses collect or purchased data that consumers create on the internet. Critics of this collection of data believe that these businesses collecting the data are acting unethical for invading the privacy of consumers (Lavandera & Morris, 2012). However, considering all the relevant laws, guidelines, and the impact on society as a whole in a deontology and utilitarian viewpoint, the collection of data for commercial use is ethical.

In this new digital world, expectations are increasing. Today, customers demand personalized, reliable and durable products and services, at the time and in the place they want them. And thanks to the large amount of data being made available by the billions of connected devices out there, it’s easier than ever before for businesses to meet these expectations. It’s because of these developments that I believe data is the new currency. (Chandrasekaran, 2015).

One thing Microsoft, Google and Facebook have in common is that they collect about as much data from each of their visitors as each other, according to an internet marketing research company (Alexa 2012). Users are concerned about the privacy of their personal information, even after the Facebook security expanded its efforts to reduce the risks to the users’ privacy. Facebook Beacon was launched in Nov 2007, a service that was ultimately a failed attempt at advertising specific products to a user’s friends depending on what known purchases that friend had made. As of last month, Facebook has begun to more closely examine the usage of its user data. Facebook accepted that it had deceived users by failing to keep certain promises regarding privacy, and agreed to settle charges laid by the United States Federal Trade Commission.