Privacy has always been an important value to Americans. The founding fathers valued it, and placed explicit protection of certain aspects of it in the Bill of Rights. But with the invasion of the internet, keeping privacy has become difficult, if not impossible. You have cookies collecting and storing data about you whenever you visit a site. You have browsers tracking the pages you visit. You have Google "scanning" your emails. You have "widgets" on sites that can see what sites you are visiting. The possibilities are endless for spying. There are ways to prevent this, such as deleting cookies and using anonymous browsers, although they are often difficult, and not foolproof. Thinking of the internet as a private venture is dangerous because online companies store, and can share, sensitive information about you; hackers and others, if they have the knowledge, can steal this personal information stored online; and if you think the internet is private, you are more likely to share personal information that you would rather others not knowing.
Whether you know it or not, advertisement, social media, and browser companies (especially Google), are collecting information about you with every click, like, email, tweet, post,search, and pin. This is supposedly to help tailor your internet experience to you by showing you interest-based ads, showing you other relative sites and posts that you might like, and by customizing you searches, so that when you type in a letter, previous searches starting with that letter show up. Robert Epstein of U.S. News says "Google can and does monitor people – perhaps upwards of 90 percent of Internet users worldwide – whether they use a Google product or not, and most people have n...
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... information that they would most likely rather not be everywhere. Do you really want your personal information stored online by corporations that you don't even know exist? With the internet, that statement is highly possible.
Work Cited
Epstein, Robert. "Google’s Gotcha: 15 Ways Google Monitors You." US News. U.S.News & World Report, 10 May 2013. Web. 06 May 2014.
Harper, Jim. "It's Modern Trade: Web Users Get as Much as They Give." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 7 Aug. 2010. Web. 06 May 2014.
Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect: The inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Print.
Pagliery, Jose. "Online Privacy Is Dead." CNNMoney. Cable News Network, 17 Oct. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
Sullivan, Bob. "Online Privacy Fears Are Real." Msnbc.com. NBC News, 6 Dec. 2013. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.
Did you know that almost everything you do on the internet is being tracked and recorded in some way? In the Article, George Orwell… Meet Mark Zuckerberg, by Lori Andrews, Andrews talks about how behavioral advertising, which is the tracking of consumer’s online activities in order to bring custom-made advertisements, is a topic that is concealed to many people and can cause damage. Search engines like Google store the searches you have made and in 2006 there were search logs released which had personal information that people were judged by (Andrews 716-717). Data aggregation is the main way Facebook makes its money. Andrews believes that it’s an invasion of privacy and is not known well enough by the public. This article is aimed at young and new internet users that are ignorant of the possible dangers on the web. Lori Andrews is successful at informing novice users about the dangers of behavioral
..., 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.
“Human beings are not meant to lose their anonymity and privacy,” Sarah Chalke. When using the web, web users’ information tend to be easily accessible to government officials or hackers. In Nicholas Carr’s “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty,” Jim Harpers’ “Web Users Get As Much As They Give,” and Lori Andrews “Facebook is Using You” the topic of internet tracking stirred up many mixed views; however, some form of compromise can be reached on this issue, laws that enforces companies to inform the public on what personal information is being taken, creating advisements on social media about how web users can be more cautious to what kind of information they give out online, enabling your privacy settings and programs, eliminating weblining,
...ompanies’ databases without our awareness—much less our approval—the more deeply the Net is woven into our lives the more exposed we become. In order to stop online tracking, we have to take personal responsibility for the information we share and modify our privacy settings. We have to get bills and regulations passed by congress so laws can be made to limit corporations from tracking and sharing our personal formation and discipline and take action upon any corporation that does not abide by the rules.
It has long been believed that information is power. Thus, people collecting personal information in ...
Rosen, David. Four ways your privacy is being invaded. 11 september 2012. 13 february 2014 .
The word “privacy” did not grow up with us throughout history, as it was already a cultural concept by our founding fathers. This term was later solidified in the nineteenth century, when the term “privacy” became a legal lexicon as Louis Brandeis (1890), former Supreme Court justice, wrote in a law review article, that, “privacy was the right to be let alone.” As previously mentioned in the introduction, the Supreme Court is the final authority on all issues between Privacy and Security. We started with the concept of our fore fathers that privacy was an agreed upon concept that became written into our legal vernacular. It is being proven that government access to individual information can intimidate the privacy that is at the very center of the association between the government and the population. The moral in...
Solove, Daniel J. “5 Myths about Privacy” Washington Post: B3. Jun 16 2013. SIRS. Web. 10
LeRoux, Yves. "Privacy concerns in the digital world." 03 Oct 2013. Computer Weekly. 24 April 2014 .
Perhaps the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, said it best when he claimed that privacy is no longer a “social norm.” Virtually everyone has a smart phone and everyone has social media. We continue to disclose private information willingly and the private information we’re not disclosing willingly is being extracted from our accounts anyway. Technology certainly makes these things possible. However, there is an urgent need to make laws and regulations to protect against the stuff we’re not personally disclosing. It’s unsettling to think we are living in 1984 in the 21st century.
If a user often views things related to cooking for example, then Facebook will start making ads pop up for cookies, grocery stores, and other food related items. Even the advertising industry is breaching on user’s privacy. When someone goes shopping at the store, there is not someone stalking them writing down everything they look at on a pad of paper, and then suggesting related stores to him or her. That would be very suspicious. Now, with Facebook, the company sneakily violates user’s privacy while making them think it is smart technology and is beneficial. Psychologically, advertisers are becoming smarter into tricking their customers. Ad suggestions are more or less an invasion of privacy by the company
Powell, Robert. "Four Ways Technology Invades Your Privacy." Lovemoney.com. N.p., 5 Oct. 2011. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
As aforementioned, in recent years the internet has increased popularity and with that comes some concerns in laws regarding the cloud. Few laws have been created to protect the users of the internet from non consensual use of personal information. “Usually the only legal precedents restricting a company is its own privacy policy but most companies give you a sense of protection without any legality behind it,”(2013, CQ Researcher, Big data and privacy). This is a problem because with no laws or policies protecting the private internet user companies will be able to do what they want with the information and nothing will stop them.
Gonchar, Michael. “What Is More Important: Our Privacy or National Security?” New York Times. New York Times, 17 Sept. 2013. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.
When it comes to social media, I found this information that explains it well. (Endangering their right to privacy 2010) states “Communications and personal information that are posted online are usually accessible to a vast number of people. Yet when personal data exist online, they may be searched, reproduced and mined by advertisers, merchants, service providers or even stalkers. Many users know what may happen to their information, while at the same time they act as though their data is private or intimate. They expect their privacy will not be infringed while they willingly share personal information with the world via social network sites, blogs, and in online communities.” Unfortunately, people should expect that social media is not private and should not share anything they consider private on these shared networks, as they are exactly that, shared.