Com125 Assignment5: Privacy In The Information Age

Internet Privacy Issues

What is privacy? Wikipedia defines internet privacy is the ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over the internet, and to control who can access that information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy). Since the internet access have become pervasive globally, privacy issues has been brought up as a significant part of the side effects in the information society. As an extreme example of Hollywood movie stars, their privacy is so open to the paparazzi and public. We can even know their personal daily lives through their photos and gossips on the magazines and the internet. The gossips of the Hollywood stars are not just open to the public, but also spread out through the internet world widely. The author of the book called Invasion of Privacy, Michael Hyatt says that the invasion of technology affects the whole US society; a credit card crime, an illegal use of others’ name, stalking and the surveillance of the government can bring a serious social conflict. All these serious privacy issues can erode both at work and at home by new technology. Therefore, the privacy issues caused by the internet technology should not be ignorant as an inevitable problems in the information age.

Spam mail and Internet Privacy

Spam mail is one of the most efficient tools for advertising within the digital media age. Every single time, when I check my email, I see at least about 5spam mails in my mailbox. I guess I receive more than 10 spam mails every single day. The types of spam mails vary such as advertising their products like cosmetics and clothing, promoting personal loans, persuading me to join social clubs and even pornographic pictures with the source of websites. Just deleting these spam mails are annoying, but even more, sometimes I cannot even recognize if the mail that I received is spam, or an email from my friend. The advertising strategy of spam mails is becoming more tactful and tricky. Sometimes, the tile of the spam mail starts with my name, or asking me an urgent favor; ‘Hi, Jennifer!’, ‘Urgent!’ or ‘Hey’. These types of titles trigger me to open up the emails at the end. This often freaks me out to know that someone can actually see my personal information from somewhere. Thus, after all my personal information is available out there somewhere to be picked by marketers or whoever wanting to use my ID. My age, gender, university, homework address, phone number and social number are ready for someone to use my identifications. This is what I feel every time when I end up opening the spam mails in my personal mail box. This common phenomenon can certainly defined as a case within invasion of privacy.

To avoid these types of cases on the internet, lately many popular websites provide the vaccine programs. However, there still is a problem with the vaccine program as well. As an example of well know Korean search engine called ‘Daum’ provides a virus vaccine program for spam mails called, ‘Spambot’ which filters spam mails and send them into the spam mail box. But, at times, I see my email from my friend is in the spam mail box. I see that this is the other type of invasion of privacy. Under the name of surveillance and protection from spam mails, the website is actually invading my privacy by filtering my personal emails. Not only ‘Daum’, but data from major Internet companies, including Yahoo! and MSN (Microsoft) have already been subpoenaed by the US and China even provided a chunk of its own search data online, allowing reporters to track the online behavior of private individuals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy). In anyways, as long as we are connected to the internet, our privacy can be tracked down somehow through programs such as Cookies or ISPs(Internet Service Provider) on the purpose of avoiding damages from invading privacy on the web. Therefore, in the age of the information society which we are in, the people should be able to define an appropriate level of privacy based on their lifestyle, financial resources, and personal values.



Reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_privacy
http://www.daum.net
http://www.powells.com

Com125 Assignment3: 'Music Downloading; Sharing? or Stealing?'

Since MP3 becomes to play an important role for majority people’s daily lives, filesharing issue became a controversial matter. On one side, file sharing is not necessarily illegal . On the other side is focused on issues predominant proportion of material shared subject to copyright. Napster, Kazaa, iTune, UGRE, Spiralfrog and Qtax are well known existing websites for downloading audio files on the web. Internet users can access and download all various genres of music at home sitting down in front of the computer, instead of going to music store and looking for a CD. Since there are numerous music downloading websites are available, this topic is worthwhile to discuss about. In recent days, it has become a necessarily significant issue to think about if music downloading can be regarded as sharing files, or stealing copyright in the virtual network society.

What is music downloading?

Music downloading can be defined that it refers to the transferring of a music file from an internet facing computer or website to a user’s local computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_downloading). Lately, it is so common to download song files to our personal computers and store them in MP3 players. We can get songs for free. Music downloading encompasses both meanings of legal downloads and downloads of material without permission or payment which people break copyright laws. Most of people like music thus; music downloading was started from the concept of file sharing based on peer-to-peer networks.

Music downloading: Copyright infringement

Copyright infringement is the unauthorized use of approved files which is covered by copyright law, in a manner that breaks one of the original copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make copied material that build upon it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement).

There are many cases of copyright infringement globally. It has been brought up in many different countries such as the US, the UK, Australia, South Korea, China and Japan. Copyright infringement became an issue about all countries who has the internet access for people. In 2006, South Korea, the most popular music download website called, ‘Monkey3’ was sued by the Association of Korean music producers and singers for providing free music files to download. It was a shock among young people especially, due to no more free music downloading access. However, what people did was looking for other websites offering free audio file downloads. The internet is unlimited information storage, and there exists billions of URLs that people can access anytime. At the end, more free music downloading websites were sued after ‘Monkey3’ was charged for their illegal music downloading offers. Once ‘Monkey3’ had to change their policy to download music files to charge for the songs using online cash. Since this change, ‘Monkey3’ have lost quite a number of users, and now they charge only for new released songs, not the entire audio file downloads.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), illegal music downloading can damage the music industry and a series of law suits led to many of these networks being closed down. In the US, the illegal downloading of music from the internet websites has influenced music industry billions of dollars loss in revenues to publishers and artists. This fact shows how the music downloading can be an inevitable economical threat to music industry. The linked webpage below shows a great moving image called 'Fighting Music Piracy'.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vEkhkBGnrYo

Music Downloading: Ethics of sharing files

“I think it’s OK to download files from the Net, even it is illegal.”( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing). According to a poll, 75% of young voters in Sweden (ages 18-20), support file sharing, even if it's illegal. Ethics of file sharing is a subfield of ethics specifically relating to the ethical implications of file sharing over computer networks and the internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing). Though the internet network, people can share files by downloading visual and audio files which are copyrighted and non-copyrighted to each other. One of the popular peer-to-peer file sharing websites called Kazaa became legal after paying a $100 million in reparations to the recording industry. It still offers a download on its official website for Kazaa 3.25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa#Current_state). There are many file sharing advocates are out there and they see free music downloads are a part of consumer culture to have a sample before getting an original product. Through downloading music files, people can reach the music artists easily and get to know more about them and their music. Also, from the downloaded music over the internet, people can start feeling interested in certain songs and become a fan of the artists. Overall, music downloading can activate the music industry not only nationally, but also globally. Me as one of the file sharing advocates, downloading music files for free from the internet is an inevitable phenomenon in the technological society. Normally, the files available on the web free do not offer a full quality of the music. People who want an original product will go out and buy the full legal product with all great bonus features. Therefore, downloading free music files on the net is about freedom for the internet users over the peer-to-peer networks.


Referece:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vEkhkBGnrYo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_downloading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_file_sharing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa#Current_state

Com125 Assignment2: A new "Dot-Com"Boom and the current society

What’s a “Dot-com” boom?

YouTube has 100 million video downloads a day, and 73 million viewers a month, and by acquiring it Google has increased the amount of video streams it controls by a factor of 10.
MySpace has 14 million viewers a month - mainly young people, a group that the traditional media is finding hard to reach. And Skype has 53 million users, with its technology widely perceived as a threat to traditional telecoms companies. Many of the acquisitions are about acquiring online communities, the fastest-growing section of internet use. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6036337.stm)

Youtube, Google and Skype are all familiar internet websites which we use often. These websites seem to dominate the market on the web.


‘Historically, the dot-com boom can be seen as similar to a number ofother technology-inspired booms of the past including railroads in the1840s, radio in the 1920s, transistor electronics in the 1950s, computertime-sharing in the 1960s, and home computers and biotechnology in theearly1980s.’(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.phptitle=History_of_the_World_Wide_Web).

How “Dot-com” boom influenced youth culture in recent days?