"Is Internet privacy dead? No, just more complicated: researchers" by Cecilia Kang

(Source: Vinogusto.com & Icicom.up.pt)

This article talks about the Internet privacy, whether internet nowadays still have privacy or not. At the present time, it is said that there are 400 million Facebook users and 10 billion Twitter users, and the purpose of signing up to these social networking sites is that they want to be seen and heard from others or vice versa. However, many internet users felt insecure about their information and privacy. When Google’s launch its social networking application recently called Google Buzz, panic attacked among the users as problem arises. There weren’t any internet privacy anymore and users were complaining and called it as privacy foul.

In this article, we can obviously find that the media issue is lost of privacy in the internet especially social networking sites and the ethical publishing on the internet. In addition, internet privacy is getting more and more complex and technologies nowadays are advancing.

(Source: Epic.org)

Clarke (1998) stated that cyberspace is attacking privacy and “the mainstreaming of the Internet has accelerated the privacy-negative impacts of information technology.” I agree with his statement as many people nowadays misused the internet. For example, a stranger ‘steals’ another user’s picture from Facebook and pretend to be her. This is very dangerous because someone’s life might be in risk if she thought that the stranger was actually her friend and met the stranger in real life. Not only that, with the aid of the popular search engine Google, almost every data and information can be found.

(Source: techfortoday.co.cc)

Furthermore, privacy matters are further aggravated as nowadays the World Wide Web makes it easier to collect new date automatically and included to databases (Cranor 1999). For instance, if keyword such as ‘free essay’ was key in by a student into the search bar in Google, he can find many websites that provide free article and although this ease himself in assignment, this way actually make him more idle in researching and thinking. According to Cranor (1999), the author mentioned that “these days, data recorded into systems or already listed into databases can be shared almost easily with transaction records as well as records of an individual’s every click through cyberspace.” Again, this would cause many internet users to be ‘stalked’ by stranger. Take an example of Google, searching a person information is not tough at all as a person just need to key in another person’s full name in the search engine, and information of that person age, location and more will be provided.

(Source: Google Image)

Internet privacy however is not dead but it is becoming more and more complicated. Thus, internet users should not simply provide their information in the internet especially in social networking sites such as Facebook because the society nowadays is not as safe as the previous years. As technologies being advance rapidly, in the future, not only personal data to be clone but also the whole ‘body figure’ of a person can be produce.

References

Kang, C 2010, “Is Internet privacy dead? No, just more complicated: researchers,” The Washington Post, viewed 14 June 2010,

< http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/03/is_internet_privacy_dead_no_ju.html>

Clarke, R 1998, “Internet Privacy Concerns Confirm the Case for Intervention,” Roger Clarke’s Website, Association for Computing Machinery Inc, viewed 14 June 2010,
< http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/CACM99.html>

Cranor, L.F 1999, “Internet Privacy: A public concern”, Communications of ACM, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 29-31, viewed 14 June 2010,
< http://www.cib.espol.edu.ec/Digipath/D_Papers/38041.pdf>