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