“Everybody with communication is a
target (Wired 04/ 2012).”
And, Wired, on the same issue, warns its
readers: “Watch what you say”
Going back to the article, Social Networking in the Surveillance Society, the author suggests
that as citizens are also subject to, what he calls, “economic surveillance.” In a typical business model, corporations that
own social networking sites, provide free access to users. Over time, as
networking sites accumulate information on personal data and user behavior,
data is eventually sold to advertising clients (Fuchs, 2010). In the same study,
students say that better public information and discussion on privacy issues would improve
their understanding of the surveillance society. Even though this sounds like a
good idea, protest and consumer groups took similar actions in the past,
but they rarely accomplished anything solid. Before the “news feed” function, users would only receive very general notifications from Facebook about their friends' updates. For instance, if friend X
updated his “quotes” on his profile, Facebook would tell you to go to that friend's profile for details about the update.When “news feed” was launched, many users protested, as they perceived constant feed of detailed updates as a threat to privacy. A number of protest groups
were created on Facebook at the time with titles such as “Facebook takes
stalking a whole new level.” Well, over the following months, all those efforts
only led to more invasive features such as the new “Timeline” or “Ticker,” which
updates stories in real-time on the right side of the screen. My overall
argument is that solely vocalizing the problem does not solve the problem. Protest
groups and consumer groups need to take a more effective action, if they want
to make a difference. They should partner with computer scientists or with
people with related technical expertise. If they want to put up a good fight,
they need to speak the same language as Apple, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon
speak, and that is the language of computer science.
I agree with the articles that support the notion that people
care about their privacy more than some might assume. However, it should not be
measured by the number of people who read privacy agreements. One problem with privacy statements is that they are hard to understand! To me they could as well be in French,
a language that scares me even from a distance. Several times I
attempted to read such privacy terms, but the result was failure. The second
problem is that, corporations make you feel entitled to “agree.” For example iTunes,
if you do not agree, it will not give you access. You can't pick which
statements of the term you would like to agree. It is an all-or-nothing deal. So, why bother reading, if you have to agree
in the end anyways?
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