Data Mining is a powerful tool that is designed to gather large sets of data at incredible speed and analyze them. Most companies use this tool to better understand their customer’s habits as well as their interests. Advertisers love this tool because it allows unprecedented amount of access to information. Most people are unaware that their data is being mined, bundled, and sold by a company to third party advertisers in order to make targeted ads more effective. This is a problematic practice because users are unaware that in most social media sites such as Facebook, this tool is used (Jessica Reyman “User Data on the Social Web: Authorship, Agency, and Appropriation”). Hidden deep into most terms of service is the right to sell and mine your information to third parties, because most people are unaware that this is the status quo of how social media and other sites make their money. It presents a potential privacy concern for users because they did not consciously consent to have their user information mined and sold. Data mining itself is a power tool in advertising, however does question is does the use and creation of Data mining algorithms have the potential to lead to privacy violations when it is used to create targeted advertisements? Facebook is a social media site that boasts 500 million users worldwide making this company one of the largest social media sites in the world. Facebook has had a myriad of its own controversies concerning how it addresses its users’ privacy. One such instance is how its’ terms of service (terms of service is what the user agrees to in order to use the service) is written in confusing legal jargon as many other sites in order to protect the owner’s rights. The section that has caused t... ... middle of paper ... ...are of the consequences of the terms of agreement that they are checking. The consumer believes that only simple data is being kept and used by the company. They are unaware that through the sophisticated use of data mining very personal information is being shared with numerous companies. Each company causes further layers of information to be mined and shared, thereby truly breaching a consumer’s level of confidentiality. Bibliography Reyman, Jessica. "User Data on the Social Web: Authorship, Agency, and Appropriation." College English 75.5 (2013): 513-33. Konopnicki, D. "A Statistical Approach To Mining Customers' Conversational Data from Social Media." IBM Journal of Research and Development 57.3/4 (2013): 1-13 Soriano, Jacopo, Timothy Au, and David Banks. "Text Mining in Computational Advertising." Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
Using the informal tone he enhances his argument by providing several thought-provoking statements that allow the reader to see the logic in the article, “Social media is designed for the information shared on it to be searched, and shared- and mined for profit… When considering what to share via social media, don 't think business vs. personal. Think public vs. private. And if something is truly private, do not share it on social media out of a misplaced faith in the expectation of privacy” (134). The reader should agree with Edmond that when posting or being a part of the social media bandwagon, you’re life and decisions will be up for display. Moreover, the business vs. personal and public vs. private point is accurate and logical, because evidently if you post something on any social media outlet you should expect that anyone and everyone can see it, regardless of your privacy settings. Edmond highlights that Facebook along with other social networking sites change their privacy settings whenever they please without
..., websites and online marketers do find ways around users’ precautions to gain personal information. There are many people out there who want to use personal information like credit card numbers or addresses to cause harm to others. These cases are the extremely negative ones that people want to and should avoid. The case of companies and third parties tracking browsing history and other information for advertising purposes hover over a finer line between good and bad. For some people, tracking can be considered convenient in terms of shopping for what they are interested in, and others may be uncomfortable with the thought of being tracked without knowing. As stated in the beginning, complete privacy is unlikely, but being informed about the tactics of the Internet can help one protect themselves and others in their care to be as careful and private as possible.
Advertisement agencies use behavioral advertisement, or third party cookies, to track customers on and off their client’s website. This allows them to create specific banner ads that display content viewed and not purchased, in hopes of getting a larger customer return and purchase rate. This practice is increasing among e-commerce and is raising concerns with ethical and privacy advocators.
Hargittai, Eszter and Boyd, Dana. “Facebook Privacy settings: Who cares?” First Monday 15.8 (2010): 12-20.
Smith, Aaron and Joanna Brenner. “Twitter Use 2012.” PewResearch Internet Project. 1-3. Web. 15 Mar. 2014.
Facebook : Every single day we read the news ,and think that Facebook might be antiprivacy. It is also observed that people often think that social networking sites offer complicated privacy settings. The CEO...
A. M. Kaplan and M. Haenlein, ‘Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media’, Business Horizons, vol. 53, no. 1, 2010, pp. 59-68.
Since both consumers and businesses advantage from the use of data mining, each party has to honour the right of the other one in order to keep an ethical function of the data mining relationship between the two of them. Long ago, data mining was only about essential and voluntary information collected from customers who were aware that their information is being gathered. Nowadays, the ethical issues raised are whether the data collected will be used against customers’ rights, and whether it will become a part that is accessible in the future by others. The strategies proposed by Payne and Trumbach, with regard to Data mining(1) and consumers’ information, propose that in the right moral structure, data mining can be ethically effective and protective to consumers’ right. Six principals are needed for a productive ethical data mining strategy: anonymity, disclosure, choice, time limits, trust and accuracy of data (Payne & Trumbach, 2009).
As a result, Web site operators or companies are able to build very detailed profiles from that behavior (Green 48). These profiles play a major role in online marketing. In the past, marketers knew their customers just as a number, but when DoubleClick, an Internet advertising company, bought out Abacus Direct, DoubleClick was able to combine its databases with the names and addresses form Abacus’ catalog customers. Now web surfers can no longer surf the net without their computers being tagged to their names. (Quinn 63) Even more disturbing, hackers can now intercept the data from the cookie.
Even though cookies serve an important role in today’s e-commerce and advertising industries, it is impossible not to think of them as a breach in user security. There is something about a seemingly forced piece of information being saved on your computer for the use of a computer hundreds or even thousands of miles away. One can only think of one word. Privacy. Who’s to say that company’s are using the information gathered by these cookies and using them for good. How do I know that you are collecting cookies for your own advertising or e-commercial purposes rather than probing me as a candidate for the ever-present adware? Do I want vendors to know exactly what it is I usually shop for when I get online? Do I really need to save my shopping time by one or two clicks with the sacrifice of decreased privacy? These are questions that each user asks themselves when we look at our internet security settings or when we are denied access to a site based on our cookie settings. Many companies have been labeled with improper actions concerning cookies. A company named DoubleClick was forced to reach a settlement in 2002 for improper conduct concerning cookies.
There are various kinds of definitions about what data mining is. The authors in [1] define data mining as “the process of extracting previously unknown information from (usually large quantities of) data, which can, in the right context, lead to knowledge”. Data mining is widely used in areas such as business analysis, bioinformatics analysis, medical analysis, etc. Data mining techniques bring us a lot of benefits. Business companies can use data mining tools to search potential customers and increase their profits; medical diagnosis can use data mining to predict potential disease. Although the term “data mining” itself is neutral and has no ethical implications, it is often related to the analysis of information associated with individuals. “The ethical dilemmas arise when data mining is executed over the data of an individual” [2]. For example, using a user’s data to do data mining and classifying the user into some group may result in a variety of ethical issues. In this paper, we deal with two kinds of ethical issues caused by data mining techniques: informational privacy issues in web-data mining and database security issues in data mining. We also look at these ethical issues in a societal level and a global level.
The growing popularity of information technologies has significantly altered our world, and in particular, the way people interact. Social networking websites are becoming one of the primary forms of communication used by people of all ages and backgrounds. No doubt, we have seen numerous benefits from the impact of social media communication: We can easily meet and stay in touch with people, promote ourselves, and readily find information. However, these changes prompt us to consider how our moral and political values can be threatened. One common fear among users is that their privacy will be violated on the web. In her book, Privacy in Context, Helen Nissenbaum suggests a framework for understanding privacy concerns online. She focuses particularly on monitoring and tracking, and how four “pivotal transformations” caused by technology can endanger the privacy of our personal information. One website that may pose such a threat is Facebook.
Today, many web sites on the internet can use "cookies" to keep track of passwords and usernames and track the sites a particular user visits (Cookiecentral.com). But, the use of cookies to track user's browsing habits is becoming a concern of many internet users. These concerned people are beginning to think of cookies as an invasion of privacy. Companies with web sites can use cookies to track what sites you visit frequently and then select specific ad banners to send to you on the web while surfing (Cookiecentral.com). Electronic Frontier Foundation's program director, Stanton McCandlish points out, "The potential problem is that companies without a sense of ethics could be doing [the] same thing and selling addresses to offline marketers" (news.cnet.com). The government should realize the hazards of internet cookies and enforce a ban on their use.
Technology has advanced tremendously over the past decade, and appears to be advancing at a rapid pace each and every day. The social media is growing just as rapidly. Social media is an interaction between individuals that want to exchange information, photographs, and ideas in different types of networks. Social media users include people of all ages. These people have various experiences, have different cultures, and have various technical skills. (Brandtzaeg 1008) The social media depend on net-based technologies to generate the network for users to share. Social media includes everything that has to do with the Internet. By using the Internet, users can communicate with people locally and worldwide. People are no longer required to travel across the world to experience another culture. This can be done with social networking. The types of social media today come with many different types of communication such as social blogs, wall-postings, songs, photographs, and podcasts. The communication between users is informational, interactive, and also educational. However, unfortunately, most social networking sites keep track of all the interactions that take place, and this is a concern about Internet privacy for Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media users. Not only do they keep track of all interactions by the users, they also own all the content, including pictures that the users upload. The social network keeps this information on the user, even if the user deactivates their account with that particular site. Most users do not have any idea that the operator of the networking service keeps this information, and has access to all pictures and tags. By not having adequate security...
In today’s world people have become way to comfortable using social networking sites. People will post comments online that they would not say in person. The crude, foul, and vulgar language people post on their profiles has become costly. Posts have gone as far as to having people being fired from their jobs, to colleges not accepting a student. The opposition would say that they have set their privacy settings on their profile, which only allow the one’s they want to have access to their profile. Therefore, they have no need to worry about what they post, because businesses or colleges have no way of viewing their profile. The oppositions point is not wrong, but it also is not all correct. Privacy settings are available for Facebook and Myspace users to allow them to limit what can be seen by the public. It is not possible to hide everything one may have on their profile. Danah Boyd, an anthropologist and social – networking expert at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that “Information is not private because no one k...