Privacy And Technology Privacy

As technology continues to grow and become incorporated in more and more of everyday life, one cannot help but wonder, can privacy and technology coexist? Privacy, along with technology, is very important, so it is critical that the two be able to coexist. There are different types of private information. These include private communications, privacy of the body, personal information, and information about one’s possessions. Yes, technology does allow private information to be stolen or seen by unauthorized persons on occasion, however, technology has also protected just as much information, if not more from being stolen or viewed by someone it was not meant for. Focusing on public expectations of privacy means that our rights change when technology

The first category is private communications. This includes all forms of communication between 2 or more people, who want to keep the conversation private. Often businesses will read emails from workers to ensure employees are staying on task and doing their jobs, but the majority of emails are meant to be kept private. When a company does this they invade the privacy of both the sender and receiver of the email. The next category is privacy of the body, which usually involves medical information. This means that a person has the right to know about the illness they have, they also have to right to keep their medical information private. Another category is privacy of personal information. This refers to information about a specific person, for example details like their name, address, and financial information, which they wish to keep private. Bank records are a good example of this, because for each member or client the bank has all of their financial information and also personal information stored on information technology. Another example of the impact technology has on privacy is the monitoring of people in the workplace. Businesses try to justify the use of “electronic eyes” by saying they use it to increase productivity, however this is a problem because it threatens worker’s privacy. The last category for private information is information about one's possessions, which is related to property rights. “According

Information can be gathered about someone because of what they make public on social media, this includes: making a profile that includes personal information, tagging a location, or posting photos that capture personal details. However, data can also be gathered without one knowing. Information is gathered on store credit card holders every time they make a purchase. “Inside such a card a computer chip is buried that records every item purchased along with a variety of personal information of the buyer. This information obtained from the card enables marketing companies to do targeted marketing to specific individuals because the buying habits as well as other personal information of people are known” (Britz, 1996). There are certain types of software that can be considered harmless, for example “Cookies are small text files with unique ID tags that are embedded in a web browser and saved on the user’s hard drive” (Bidgoli, 2015) Another type of software that doesn’t have malicious intent is adware, which is simply a marketing tactic that collects data about internets users to determine which advertisements to put in each user’s web browser. Unfortunately, there are also types of software that do have malicious intent. One of these is Spyware, which is a type of software that gathers information about users, without their consent while they browse