The key points of this week's readings are that our ideas of privacy have changed over time, and that we have become somewhat unaware of these changes. Our information is sort of our payment for the use of social media sites, since it is used for companies to gear their advertisements and services toward us based on our information.
Papacharissi says being able to protect our private information is a luxury since us who are computer literate know how to make these adjustments, which I think is interesting. It makes the digital divide an even deeper issue, at least within participants who are users. The "have-nots" within the user realm are more susceptible with having their personal information shared and compromised. An example from the NPR radio piece of how their lack of computer literacy could hinder them is if a loan company sees pages they've viewed because their privacy settings are not properly set, they could make assumptions about the person that would prevent them from getting a loan or cause them to have higher interest rates.
Mui's article is disturbing since now all someone really needs to get information about someone is their picture and a program to detect features of that person's face. The fact that they can find something as private as someone's SSN from their picture is frightening. If the technology to do this becomes easily available to even businesses our extremely personal information could be compromised so much that our identities could be easily stolen, and what's scarier is a good amount of the population would probably have no idea this is possible.
I think the controversy of Facebook's privacy settings as presented in Angwin, Raice, and Ante's article aren't as startling as the information about the other two articles. The unexpected changes in privacy are sometimes annoying, since sometimes we don't know how long we've gone without noticing, but even after reading the article I don't feel that someone's information could be too compromised. I do agree that they should give fair warning before making any changes, though.
I definitely think privacy should be up to the user. I think it is ridiculous that users cannot opt out of Google's privacy settings. The argument is that our payment for using a service like Google is to share our information for advertisers and companies, but we contribute in far more important ways than that. As we learned earlier in class, users add value and have an effect on content that is on a site, especially one like Google. Users essentially make Google work by using the site, we shouldn't be expected to share our personal information on top of that. I also don't feel that privacy settings and our information that sites share should be transparent, so we know exactly what to expect. We shouldn't have to search what is kept private of our own information. In the last article, Google did not reveal that Gmail information goes beyond email, but to the rest of the net. Information like this should not be concealed!
I think Facebook's privacy settings are acceptable, and I really don't mind having ads catered to my expected tastes, especially since some are rather amusing. The only things that really worry me about a lack of privacy is the access of extremely private information, like my social security number, and that I could be denied access to things such as insurance later in life based on the pages I've viewed on the Web. I look at a lot of random things on the Internet and would appreciate not being judged for it!
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