The Importance Of Your Personal Data?

The internet is a vital part of our lives, but what if I said it was a completely public one? Privacy is a rare commodity in today's world. As Nicholas Carr writes about in his essay “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty,” corporations pay close attention to citizens. The most frightening part is that this practice is perfectly legal. Even recently the government stripped more of our privacy away. In the beginning of April 2017, President Trump repealed regulations by the Federal Communications Commission that would have forced internet service providers to gain consent before selling data collected from their customers. However, corporations aren't the only ones capturing data from internet users. The government is also making use of these records.

Many companies have gathered personal information online to target ads with the user’s preferences, but tracking can allow companies to find out your credit card number, where you live and your interests. Hence, the NSA should be incriminated for utilizing personal information that can endanger a person’s security by using information from social networks, experimenting and distributing information.

Modern Americans see privacy as one of the greatest freedoms. When Edward Snowden revealed the NSA surveillance program, the citizens of the United States were appalled by the extent of access the NSA had to personal information. However, according to Dan Tapscott in his essay, “Should We Ditch the Idea of Privacy?” we post just as many details daily on our numerous social media outlets. The majority of the information we freely post is not meaningful and does no harm to us by being public, yet there is a dangerous side to our open-book nature.

There is a lurking ethical issue that is facing contemporary society and that has already started to affect the military, but has the potential to grow even more monstrous. Online privacy or internet privacy is the root of this issue and “following the revelations of widespread data collection by the United States government, among others, the public has to decide whether to push for legislation that would safeguard their online privacy, and which criteria, if any, should first be met by government agencies before invading civilians' privacy”.

Privacy is what allows people to feel secure in their surroundings. With privacy, one is allowed to withhold or distribute the information they want by choice, but the ability to have that choice is being violated in today’s society. Benjamin Franklin once said, “He who sacrifices freedom or liberty will eventually have neither.” And that’s the unfortunate truth that is and has occurred in recent years. Privacy, especially in such a fast paced moving world, is extremely vital yet is extremely violated, as recently discovered the NSA has been spying on U.S. citizens for quite a while now; based on the Fourth Amendment, the risk of leaked and distorted individual information, as well as vulnerability to lack of anonymity.

Time Newspaper has learnt that it's not surprising that Internet companies have electronic dossiers that contain personal information for individuals who subscribe to the websites. Generally, these companies have obtained the information from people based on individual's visit to the website, sent and received emails, tagged photos, and searches people carry out. However, the extent of personal information known by these Internet companies has remained largely unknown as well who they provide and/or sell this information to. However, Internet companies continue to gather lots of personal information from different people who focus on carrying out online activities on a daily basis. Currently, it's estimated that these firms gather personal information from nearly 500 million users but are hesitant to provide this information to the other firms or individuals. As their unwillingness to share has attracted significant congressional inquiry, things could finally change in California following the introduction of a bill that may force companies to disclose the kind of personal information they have gathered and how this information is being used.

Personal interest in the right to privacy has intensified in recent years along with the rapid development of new technologies. A century later, these concerns remain, but many others have joined them. Advances in information and communications technology have increased our ability to collect, store and transmit data about individuals. While these advances could be considered useful, some see them as a situation where anyone can watch and record the actions of every individual, and where the individual has lost control over information about herself and thus over her very life. As a reaction to these concerns, new regulations have been formulated to define the rights of individuals and the limits on the use of technology with respect to personal information.

Since digital information data is now considered as the new gold mine, national security and privacy on the internet can be seen as alternate extremes relying upon the gathering of people’s digital footprint and data. Understanding the foundational structure of each discipline, can bring critical cognizance to both the sides of the issues. Many academic and research scholars find the definition of privacy shady, complex, and ambitious. As stated by Robert. C. Post “Privacy is a value so complex, so entangled in competing and contradictory

Government surveillance in the past was not a big threat due to the limitations on technology; however, in the current day, it has become an immense power for the government. Taylor, author of a book on Electronic Surveillance supports, "A generation ago, when records were tucked away on paper in manila folders, there was some assurance that such information wouldn 't be spread everywhere. Now, however, our life stories are available at the push of a button" (Taylor 111). With more and more Americans logging into social media cites and using text-messaging devices, the more providers of metadata the government has. In her journal “The Virtuous Spy: Privacy as an Ethical Limit”, Anita L. Allen, an expert on privacy law, writes, “Contemporary technologies of data collection make secret, privacy invading surveillance easy and nearly irresistible. For every technology of confidential personal communication…there are one or more counter-technologies of eavesdropping” (Allen 1). Being in the middle of the Digital Age, we have to be much more careful of the kinds of information we put in our digital devices.

There is no doubt the privacy of our online activities and the integrity of our communications have been the biggest casualty of the NSA’s surveillance of our lives. Although ongoing revelations of government eavesdropping have had a profound impact on many different aspects in life. The NSA must balance out their interference with citizens lives because it’s undermining the government's leadership on internet safety, deteriorating internet security, and is causing economic losses to U.S. businesses due to decreasing customer trust.

No longer do we live in an age where families socialize with one another face to face on a consistent basis with absolute privacy. In today’s society, technology has consumed most of our time leaving us zombified staring deep into the soul of a screen of some sort. In fact, you are doing just exactly that at this very moment. Privacy is no longer existent because little do people know, the screens they are staring into are staring right back. Our advancement in technology has without a doubt moved us a couple steps towards the world of Big Brother in the book 1984. However, we are still very distinct in the way in which we govern and use the data collected from our technology. .

Daniel Solove, a professor who specializes in internet privacy law, wrote this book to give his personal take on how the internet was transforming the way people connect through social mediums and how that could change in the future. An important thing to note about this book is that it was published in 2007, so some of the social and technological aspects of the book are slightly dated. Regardless of this though, this book provides an inquisitive perspective on the dynamic nature of the internet as a vessel of our society’s changing norms on privacy in the social sphere. Many of our learning points in class relate to topics discussed in this book and help to strengthen the context and significance of the underlying message.

Explores the possibilities between two possible outcomes in a world where our reliance technology in our daily life has increased from “nice to have” or convenient to “cannot live without.” Scenario one explores, society embracing networking on a global scale and increasing interoperability in a world that relies heavily on virtual reality or “augmented reality (Mittlemen 44.)” Scenario two explores, world governments shutting themselves off from one another digitally and restricting usage to within its own sovereign territory through slowing down the network, increasing advertisements, selling your personal information that is posted online without your permission.

The words, “Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say” were said by Edward Snowden who is a computer professional in America. Similarly, the essays “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty,” “Web Users Get as Much as They Give,” and “Facebook Is Using You” from Nicholas Carr, Jim Harper, and Lori Andrews respectively points out that the internet privacy is good and bad. However, the articles by Carr and Andrews are based on the negative side of the internet privacy, which means that the internet privacy is not good. On the other hand, Harper’s article is based on the positive side of the internet privacy, which means that the internet privacy is good and scary, but people need to be careful of their own information and browsing histories, and websites. Jim Harper’s essay is more relevant and reasonable than the Nicholas Carr and Lori Andrews’s essays. However, Harper seems more persuasive to readers because he believes that the internet is good if people use it in a right way, whereas Carr and Andrews believe that the internet is not good at all.

In today’s world, people tend to run the majority of their daily errands through the internet. It is very easy, convenient, and it saves a lot of time. In one hour someone can make a deposit into his personal bank account, order a medical prescription, pay bills, apply for a loan, get some shopping, and more. All it takes for a customer to be able to do this is having an account with each of these company’s websites. Creating an account is usually a very simple process where the person provides some information and creates a username and a password to be in a position to return to the website. This information provided by the client is called: digital data or digital information, which is simply any kind of information in digital format. Digital data can be public or private, it can be kept by the government, banks, medical providers, and other institutions; as well as a freely available on the internet on websites like myspace.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But is our data really safe? Along with its many benefits, the march of technology makes an encompassing surveillance network seem almost inevitable. We owe much of the privacy we have enjoyed in the past to a combination of immature technology and insufficient manpower to monitor us. But these protective inefficiencies are giving way to efficiency technologies of data processing and digital surveillance that threaten to eliminate our privacy. Already we are tracked by our