Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Privacy & Confidentiality

The thing about New Media is that anything and everything is easily distributed online. Including private information, pictures, and videos. Many people forget how easy it is for something incriminating or embarrassing can be spread around the internet by friends or complete strangers. This can easily lead to serious consequences, such as bullying, harassment, employment termination, and if you are well known in the real world or even virtual world it could result in harsh criticism by people all over the world.

Of course those aren't the only privacy concerns. There is also matters containing to finance and identity theft. Some websites sell the personal information they gather from people opening accounts, which causes a lot of unwanted junk mail or spam email. And in the case of security breaches such as someone stealing the data off of new media website's servers or hacking their servers, they can do a lot of harm with that data.

So confidentiality is clearly a must have for many websites. The websites should have sufficient security and data encryption to prevent people from stealing that data. And the websites should have clear privacy policies stating what they intend to do with any personal information they gather.

5 comments:

  1. sites like spokeo.com which charges a fee, but gathers information from all your online use.

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  2. there is a company called life lock which protects all of your valuable info and if it fails to protect you they have to pay a million dollars to the individual. This company should be taken advantage of especially with the fear of your info being taken from the internet.

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  3. That's mighty interesting. Well I have a likening towards exaggeration which may lead to cynicism and fear mongering.

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  4. I remember reading comments on other websites every now and then that defend companies that only state their shadier practices in their privacy policies and EULA so they can use it as an excuse to do those things to begin with. What's funny about this is that if those privacy policies state that signing up is the same as agreeing to let the companies do those shady and illegal things, they're still completely invalid in the eyes of the law.

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  5. Companies do make a lot of money because they collect all the info from acconts that we create online and we as a user give permission them to use our info. anyway they want and its all written in their privacy act which we accept before creating but the only difference is that WE NEVER READ IT.

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