Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Privacy and Confidentiality


Participating in new media can involve disclosure of great amounts of personal information.  With this disclosure the issues of privacy and confidentiality have become a major talking point and critical issue in the world of new media.  

New media encourages interaction and involvement in posting to the web.  We would like to think that this information is safe and secure and only viewable by those who we intend to view and access it. This is sometimes not the case and it can have negative impacts.  It takes a lot of time and effort to configure privacy settings.  This is the main critique of the way Facebook has it's privacy settings laid out.  Users are also auto enrolled in any new service where personal information is required.

Private information is not only subject to being seen by fellow users. This information has become increasingly valuable to marketing firms. Many businesses are modeled solely around collecting personal information on the internet and creating huge data mines. This information can be packaged and sold to marketing companies who in turn can be more efficient in their targeted advertising.  

The popularity of using new media has resulted in an enormous amount of personal data on the internet.  New issues now exist in this new world culture.  Privacy and confidentiality can be upheld, but it is of a minuscule amount where this is totally the case.

1 comment:

  1. It seems that the privacy problem is inevitable so the only thing we can do now is to protect ourselves and not to share our information to the public. It is best not trust the internet for protecting our private information.

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