The TechCentrics Where Technology and the Internet Meet

Social Networking Privacy

I wrote a formal report for my Ethics class last week, my topic was how social networking has basically destroyed internet privacy.  As more and more data is collected and viewed on these sites, less and less information can be considered your own.  Once its up there, its considered the public domains information, especially the information that you leave public on social networks.  This data is mainly used by advertisement companies to target their audience more, but it is also used by the social networks to focus their energy on making their websites more tailored to their users.

Social networks are a great addition to the internet, only problem is that it has made it that much easier to steal someone elses identity.  An interesting article I found while researching for this paper was at the New York Times website,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/technology/17privacy.html.  One data pooling experiment caculated with a 78% accuracy out of 4,000 users if they were gay or not.  Another research experiment done by the University of Texas was able to connect users accounts even with their identity information stripped down, with 30% accuracy.

If you are interested to hear more, go to the New York Times article, I might post my report in a while.  Its just very interesting to me that we are so hyped up on privacy, but when it comes to the internet, we really don't have any privacy to speak of.  When you put yourself out there like I do to all of these different services to connect with other users as well as connecting your life to the internet you really have to step back and ask yourself why are you giving out this information?  The reason I have created this website is because I want to share my insight on the technology world and how it affects both my career as well as others.