Today's prompt is all about privacy. Before you read the FB privacy statement, think about what online privacy means to you. Tell me a bit about it. What do you consider to be privacy online?
Then look at Facebook's privacy statements. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/policy.php?ref=pf
What are your reactions? Anything upset you? Anything make you feel better? Is FB in line with what you think privacy online should be?
Remember this, and last Wednesday's prompt are due tomorrow by 1pm.
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5 comments:
I don't believe that there is much internet privacy at all especially on social networking websites like facebook. A website like facebook is designed to share your information with millions of other people which makes it kind of difficult to hide information because thats the opposite of what it is supposed to do. I think that online privacy is when other people can only see what you want them to see and can only find out information you want them to find. Also when only certain people can find that information out. After looking over facebook's privacy policy i feel that it is pretty reasonable for the most part. It makes it very clear that any information that you post may be seen by other people and if you don't want something to be known don't put it on your facebook. Also facebook does provide a lot of security settings that allow for people to decide who can see certain information about them. What scares me is the fact that facebook stores so much information and if someone hacked into its database they could find out so much about so many people and get around the security settings an individual may set. I personally believe that if you don't want people to see a picture or know something about you that you shouldn't put it on the internet and that is the best possible security that exists.
Online privacy is the ability to restrict others' access to information about myself. If I want my whole facebook network to be able to see something, then I can allow that, but if I only want a select few people to be able to have access to it, I can also have that privilege. I have wondered what happens to facebook chat conversations. I am sure they are stored one way or another, and it mildly concerns me that I have no control over them. As far as law enforcement goes, like with Google refusing to hand over their user history to the feds, I don't worry about my content being taken. In my personal opinion, the internet does not exist for privacy, rather the opposite. I'm not going to put pictures or other content that is self-incriminating on the internet, because I know that nothing on the web is airtight safe from being viewed by the wrong people.
I wasn't surprised by anything I saw on the facebook privacy policy. I think that facebook is in line with what I think online privacy should be. Their system for advertising seems very in-depth. I appreciate that we have as much control as we do, over limiting access to things in our profile.
When I think of internet privacy I worry about two things: Data-mining our information and if there is any course of action to protect us from outside parties viewing our information. After viewing the Facebook privacy page I am not any more comfortable with any of the information on my Facebook.
My first problem is that there seems to be no defense against an employer or other third party from accessing information or photos. As shown in in the Privacy page, "Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site." Anybody could look at our information. Why should I be so trusting to think that facebook wouldn't sell corporations a program to circumvent to the privacy settings on facebook. That not only sound ridiculously lucrative but the users of facebook would never have to know.
Aside from that, we get data mined everywhere we go, It would be nice to see a limit on how long they can hold information though.
To me, online privacy is the amount of protection needed to keep someone's specified information secure. Although there will always be people trying to break through these defense, for the most part, information can be safe on a secure site. It is important to read each sites privacy statement whe you sign up, so you know exactly what information about you will not be secure.
After reading Facebook's privacy statement I am not surprised. I already knew they allowed you to control what information of yours is secure through their privacy settings. What I haven't thought about is what information you put on other people's pages (notes, wall posts, picture tags) that might not be secure. As far as a social networking site, Facebook is doing a good job with it's online privacy settings and customizable security options.
Internet privacy to me seems like one of those lofty goals that Al Gore brought up in his speech. It just isn't too possible. With the accessibility and fickleness of software it is difficult to have complete internet security much less privacy. If it isn't someone actively attacking your email or facebook accounts. It's tracking cookies or trojans gathering information about you. Internet privacy doesn't exist, anywhere and everywhere you go, there's someone that knew you went there and was interested in how they can benefit from that.
Now the facebook privacy policy seems decent enough. But then you have to think about the enforcibility of it. One thing that caught my eye when skimming initially, was the rule disallowing 13 year olds registering on the website. However, what really prevents people from doing that. All there is is a question asking your age. Easily fooled, I doubt many kids would think twice between lying on that thing. Thinking about that, you have to question how enforcable a lot of the privacy policy is, and how many ways there are to get around it. Sure the ones that say what facebook will and won't do with your information is enforcable since it's actually facebook doing it, but a lot of the other stuff must have workarounds.
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