Tuesday, October 14, 2008

issues on privacy

In October 15th’s reading for class, “The externalities of search 2.0: The emerging privacy threats when the drive for the perfect search engine meets Web2.0” by Michael Zimmer, brought an interesting, yet scary fact to my attention. Zimmer describes in the first section of his article about the quest for the “perfect search engine,” the “perfect reach,” and the “perfect recall.” However, I believe there is no such thing as “perfection,” especially if it is something created by us humans. As every story goes, there is always a bad thing that comes along with the good things, and vice versa. Well, with the vast advancements of technology, Web 2.0 to be specific, it has brought us countless numbers of good things. Then there is the downside, which would be the issue of privacy in this case. While it is very convenient for us to do almost anything and everything on the internet today, we forget that not everyone behind the computer screen is the most innocent person in the world. Cases of identity theft, fraud, and many other crimes have increased as people have been scamming a lot on the internet. I, myself have almost been a victim of a scam very recently as I was trying to sell one of my used textbooks on facebook.

It’s so easy for us to go on a search engine, or any website to search for personal reasons or communicate with others on the internet, not realizing who is reading your information and who is able to obtain any kind of activity you perform while you are online. Many, if not most of us, do not realize or consider the fact that there is nothing “private” on the internet. Any and every information on the “World Wild Web” can be obtained by a complete stranger. This reality came to my attention when my boyfriend’s sister was first starting off her career as a singer in Korea. During the time of her first debut, she made a negative comment on her friend’s private page about another artist. Although it was all fun and jokes between her and her friend, the comment she had made was all over the Korean media in no time. The scary part was that this website is not even a site that many people in Korea use.

No matter how far in technology we get, there will always be some kind of glitch that will affect us in one way or another. With my personal experiences along with Zimmer’s article, I have come to realize that you always have to be careful of what you are doing on the internet and what kind of information you are putting out there for the whole world to have access to with just a simple few clicks of their mouse.

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