I'd like to have you reflect a bit more on privacy.
Think about what online privacy means to you. Tell me a bit about it. What do you consider to be privacy online?
Is FB in line with what you think privacy online should be?
Do you think that online privacy and online safety are related? If so, how?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
To me online privacy is not letting people see personal information i.e. SSN, mother's maiden name, bank account numbers and such. Other things like people not being able to see your facebook profile is different, my thought process is, if you don't want people looking at it don't put it up, and if you want your friends to really see a picture you took or a video, show them a real picture, or go to their house and watch the video with them. If that isn't possible e-mail the thing. It really annoys me when people are so shocked and horrified by the fact that people can see their profile picture, WELL DUH! It's a networking site, people are supposed to be able to see things, if you have bad things on there take it off, or better don't put them on in the first place.
I was on one of my dairy friend's facebook and she had all these pics of herself dancing on poles and drinking, first I had a good laugh at her, then her future when she tries to get a job and those pics will probably still be there.
I think facebook is fine with privacy, it gives you the option to set everything so not even your friends can see things, and the fact that the default is set to open doesn't bother me, get over it. It says so in the terms of agreement, if your mad that facebook didn't tell you that... they did, your just didn't take the time to explore facebook when your first got it, or read the terms.
Of course safety and privacy are related, they need eachother. If everything was open to everyone at any time that wouldn't be very safe at all. When you think of safety you think of bank vaults and police officers patroling, locks on doors. When you think of privacy you think of keeping things away from undesireables with locks and secrets.
I've never really thought a lot about online privacy -- most of my online interactions consist of social networking things like FB, Twitter, or blogs where I don't *expect* privacy, or where the point of the site is to be a platform for me to make things public. I think privacy would be making sure information that I want to remain private does so -- at least, if I give something to the people who run the site then they shouldn't be able to display or give it away without my permission.
FB is mostly in line with what I think privacy online should be because I don't expect it to be private at all! I know we talked a bit about how it reverses the standard by making you choose what to make private rather than vice-versa, but other than that it about meets my expectations.
Online privacy, to me, means having the ability to control who has access to my personal information. I think it's reasonable to expect that when I provide sensitive financial or geographic information when registering at some website, my information will only be used for the intended purpose and it not made publicly available to anyone else. For sites that ask for phone numbers, e-mail addresses, birth dates, etc., there should be an easy option to make this information hidden from public viewing. However, I don't think online privacy extends to extraneous profile information or postings people make in blogs or on social networking sites.
For the most part, Facebook is in line with what I think online privacy should be. It does allow us to privatize our information and become more invisible, if we wish to be. But as we discussed in class last week, it's probably not a good idea (from the users' perspective) to have all information public and accessible to everyone from the start. I also think Facebook is crossing the line and breaching its users' privacy when it collects information about them from other online sources.
Online privacy and safety are definitely related. For example, younger teenagers may be putting themselves in danger if they submit personal information (such as their address) to a site like Facebook and that information is not kept private. All the older people who have access to the networks that teenager is in should not have access to that information. Although it is relatively rare for online predators or stalkers to get to their victims in person, it can and does happen. People need online privacy to protect themselves from others who would use their information in harmful ways.
First, I think what you post or don’t post online is a personal responsibility. If you done want pictures of you being drunk and rambunctious then either don’t take pictures of it, don’t talk about it, or if you don’t want people to know then you probably just shouldn’t do it. I guess what I mean is, you have to be aware that what you do may result in consequences in other areas of your life. You chose the things you do, you have to deal with them. I know this seems a bit harsh, but you can’t blame Facebook for your actions. Although I do agree that Facebook’s privacy settings are “backward” you should start with everything hidden or “safe” and then get to let people in.
I do think privacy and safety are related, if you have a lot of privacy online chances are nobody’s going to be able to reach you to hinder your security. But also, you have to be smart about safety just as you are privacy, don’t be all willy-nilly about personal information and such.
And just as a side note I thought it was really interesting what we were talking about in class, about being in a public place talking about something private. How someone who goes to listen in on that conversation is a “creep”. Facebook has some of those same qualities of being an open place that people tend to share more personal type information. The difference here is that when you say it as soon as you stop talking it’s gone. On Facebook it could stay there forever.
As the people that I had dinner with after class on Monday can tell you, I was extremely disturbed by what we were talking about in class. It makes me feel unsafe that my information is being sold to others on facebook. I absolutely agree with the man that said it used to be that we could chose what to make public and online networking systems are reversing those processes. I think things should be set to private and then we should make things public.
I think the reasons why things online get get so sketchy and dangerous is because it's so easy to go too far. It's easy to look around at people's information then before they know it, they know too much. And if a person has any temptation at all to perform any act of an online predator,the readily available information might just push them over the edge. And that is also an over dramatic analysis of the situation, but it's incredibly possible. And it's awful because facebook is such a fun thing to use until creepy people are talking to you and companies are buying your info. Then FB is super lame.
(brendan m)
I think privacy means being able to control what you want to be seen by certain individuals, and the ability to remove that information.
It doesn't have to be personal information, like on FB, it can be intellectual property, copyrighted material, etc.
With that in mind, internet privacy is fiendishly difficult to really obtain, as the internet is constantly being archived thousands of pages at a time. Not to mention we trust facebook with so much of our information... do we really know what an indeterminate amount of time is going to be? Not to mention, there are many ways to find deleted information on a hard drive- you have to demagnetize it or destroy it outright. People could find your info on a server if they really wanted to, even after removal. Think about how long it would take to sufficiently wipe the servers if it takes a few passes of defragmenting, etc. on your hard drive for the data to really disappear. Digital information is not as easy to remove as many people think.
In my eyes privacy is something that allows me to do what I want at my own discretion without having other all in my business and questioning my actions. For example, if I wanted to have a ton of people over to my home and we are just having fun and doing what people my age do, no one can tells us what to do in the home I pay for.
When it comes to online privacy, I consider it to be something that protects the individual who subscribes to the site. When I say protecting when subscribing or signing up for the site I mean the protection of certain information the individual was asked to give ( i.e. address, phone number, SSI #, and anything that could be used in any type of identity theft). Many people sign up for internet services believing that what they are doing is safe. When they see that “https” or “shttp” they should and/or possibly think that they have no worries when it comes to the safety of the sight when it comes to giving out information that could cause them to take heed.
I think facebook meets all of my privacy expectations. Facebook allows for people to make public what they want, and it only allows people to search for others if and only if they know their names, which is not always what people put into the system based in their specific security and comfort level. Although they forward your personal shopping interests to companies and marketers I think that FB is a very private place when it comes to what the public world sees.
I think online privacy and safety are related. They both are created to keep the user safe and also help in stopping any type of internet safety issues.
Online privacy means protection from revealing important information about myself. For example, I would want to be protected from the online community from seeing my things such as my phone number, address, and social security number. Otherwise, I don't mind revealing facts and pictures about myself. I tend to feel that certain people would not care much about what I put on facebook. All they would do is judge me in some manner and forget about it. I do not mind being open as long as I don't have a creepy stalker, which I believe I don't.
I think it is kind of odd how facebook allows its users to put up personal information such as a phone number. It seems like a terrible idea to put stuff like that up on the internet. Nevertheless, Facebook gives its users a choice about what they put up online. People need to be smart about what they put up online. I believe it is all a matter of choice, and if Facebook chooses to reveal everything before, the users need to change up the settings. Otherwise, I think Facebook is pretty much in line with what prvacy online should be.
Online privacy and online safety are not relaeted because online privacy depends on how private a network is and online safety relates to being careful about what one is doing online. Everyone deserves their online privacy. Online safety depends on choosing how safe one wants to be online.
So as far as it seems, online privacy stands at its best being where internet users have control over how they are anonymously seen on the internet, and at the most basic level, a username, in place of a real-life name. This is the first barrier between the reality of the internet and real life. And as more aspects and features are added to the functionality of the internet, mere pseudonyms are still able to protect the rightful privacy of an internet user.
But intro the average social networking site into this situation, and one must realize that these sites are based on breaking the privacy-giving barriers of the internet, using real names, concerning the lives of actual people. Just the act of joining a social networking site begins with negating or neglecting the right of privacy over the internet. Social networking attempts to evade privacy in effort to connect people, which it does so, sometimes successfully. Yet in a capitalist society, where one entity hands over a certain valuable commodity to another for exchange of a service, pure business as such is generally perceived as the norm, and doing the best of it is commonly dreamed of. And in a social networking site like Facebook, where personal information is the commodity transferred over so that people may be connected online, a capitalist society may see no morals in capitalizing on who else would pay real cash for this information. The only person on Facebook who actually has real privacy and security is Facebook, because they have the means to control and survive within the market of connecting people. Thus the actual goal behind social networking is to not utilize every single drop of oil to refine into cash, it is to actually do so in the most insignificant and unseen manner behind a ideological visage of connecting people. Money is still to be made off of personal information, and if we start to dislike it, well, that only leads to the next revolutionary way of connecting people to mine countless bits of personal information to sell.
Post a Comment