Privacy
The new media is a great tool for reaching a large audience if you want to be heard. These platforms are inherently free and available to across the society to corporations, politicians, digital marketers, and common citizens. Being on social media has become a very effective and low-cost way of reaching someone who shares similar interests with you.
New media is also inherently designed to deprive privacy. Because it is based on sharing there is not really a good way to have a control over your privacy when one is using new media. Right of the bat, by creating a profile you have already exposed at the very least your name, email, birthday, and location. We are at the level where these attributes are not even considered private anymore. Often before creating a profile a user is asked to agree that their information can be used “to better serve” the client. Depending on the platform, there are also questions like political affiliation, religious affiliation, hobbies, and whatnot. In many cases this information is further share with 3rd parties, advertisers, and governments.
The universal wisdom is that if you delete your account or never create one to begin with, you have positioned yourself better when it comes to privacy. However, companies have gotten smarter and by using data analytics they are able to predict a profile based on the interactions users on their platform have with you. Tagging you on a photo or simply mentioning you in a tweet are the obvious examples. In addition, two very concerning examples are Snowden’s revelation about the Prism project, and the scandal with Cambridge Analytica where the “friend of a friends” insights were exploited.
New media is here to stay, and the protection of privacy will have to be a collaborative effort. Self-education of the user how to behave online is the first and most important step. Next, the government should follow with legislature similar like GDPR, and last but not least new media providers and influencers on their platform should consider ethics before exercising their marketing decisions.
1 comment:
Hi Aleksandar, yes I agree that whatever is posted onto the internet will never be private. Even deleting an account does not fully erase the data that has been put into the internet, thus making internet privacy an issue. One thing everyone should keep in mind is that information that you want to keep private should not be posted on the internet.
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