This concern/idea of privacy has been around for years. Below shows the results that Google has containing the word privacy dating back to 1900. The term has been gaining an enormous amount of popularity since the 1990s.
Starting with the fourth amendment which protects one from searches and seizures.
Along with this, the first amendment which grants freedom of speech complicates matters of privacy. Privacy can also be thought of as surveillance. This idea of surveillance was originally someone watching you in your own home but more recently people can observe from a distance by planting bugs, detecting sounds from windows and reading electronic submissions. Protecting a user from electronic surveillance has become more prevalent in the last 2 years as people place personal information on social networking sites. A balance between sharing personal, identifying information and protecting that information must be found.
You may wonder, who thought of Youtube or Twitter or other social networking services? These obviously did not come about overnight. There was great thinking involved in the creation of such sites. It all started with Usenets in 1979 which allowed users to post articles to groups called "newsgroups". Next came Bulletin Board Systems in the late 70s which allowed users to log on to a system and contact others. Online and chatting services came next allowing users to play games and shop online. But these advances did not come until nearly 2 decades later in the 90s. Dating and blogging sites furthered the advancement of social networking sites until Friendster came about in 2002 as the world's first modern social network. (I'm pretty sure I've signed up for a Friendster account but know of no one who actually uses the site.)
The graph below shows the growth of Myspace, whose user population peaked in 2007, and Facebook, whose user population is steadily rising.
Friendster was originally developed to allow a safer place for people to meet friends online. Hi5 allowed users to set their profiles public or private. Sites like LinkedIn and Myspace allow
contact through private messages as well as publicly on profile "walls". What are 2 things that all of these social networking sites have in common? All of them have gradually added features of the years to accommodate the interest changes of their users AND they all are concerned about the privacy of their user population.
It seems like the only way you can have web privacy these days is by following the example of the person to the right.
You may think that I am biased towards social networking privacy, more specifically Facebook privacy. But, when I perform a simple Google search with the word "privacy" specifically looking at results from 2010, 5 out of 10 of the 1st page of results deals with Facebook privacy. Therefore, the public is growing more wary of this particular service and it's a huge concern, especially considering that it is the largest social networking site out there with over 500 million users. In the future though, I promise I will discuss a wider diversity of issues. Just you wait and see...
Nice work! I'm sure some of this will be referenced in class a bit later when we specifically discuss privacy.
ReplyDeleteI agree that with the advancements of technology there is a decreased amount of privacy. I recently learned that companies track what websites we visit and then use this data to target advertisements and services to us. On the one hand, it is helpful because it decreases the amount of time we spend searching for information. However where do we draw the line between helpful and stalkerish!
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