Invasion of Your Privacy

In this week's reading, we discussed how people and companies are getting your personal information through the Internet. Six different ways come to mind: monitoring, selling information, spam, identity theft, hijacking and infecting, all of which are ways that our information that is put up about ourselves online can be taken away from us without anyone knowing it. In this blog, I want to discuss one of these six, which is selling information, and how this is potentially the worst way to have your information stolen from you.

According to what Potter says on page 287 of our textbook, "Many Internet companies mine data on all sorts of topics and sell this information to anyone willing to pay, such as advertisers, future employers, prospective romantic partners, identity thieves, and predators." Yes, you did read that correctly, the companies sell your information to anyone that is willing to pay the company to take it. Some of this information can be found freely online, and the textbook lists a few websites where you can go to access this, such as: (Google.123people.com), (PeekYou.com), and (Snitch.name) (p.287). As a side note, I actually checked out all three of these websites, and the first one did not seem to work but the other two did.

So let's put this into prospective and look at an example of this. Say that you are really into golf for some reason and you list this as one of your hobbies that you like to do on your MySpace and/or Facebook profile(s). Advertisers try to come up with ways to have people buy their latest and greatest golfing equipment, so what does MySpace and Facebook do, they let those advertisers have your information so that just about everytime you log in, you see ads about golf cubs, golf balls, etc. on your profile pages. Now, did you ask for this stuff to start appearing on your profiles? I would hope the answer to that question would be "no".

Of course though, some people think that when they sign up to websites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc, they think that everything they put on those websites is safe from harm and that they will be fully protected from their information being used in harmful ways, and those believe this are wrong. Although there are indeed user agreements that people are supposed to look at before making a profile online, do people really read those things? I would bet not because most people either do not have the time or do not seem to care, so they just click the little box that says they have read the user agreement, and away they go. PBS actually made a couple of videos that are up on youtbe, and in the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAnz1QxLvIk, it talks about some of the issues regarding Facebook and its private policies. In this video, it talks about how people have claimed that Facebook is sharing the information collected on its website and is sharing this information with advertisers. It also shows ways that the users of Facebook can change their profile settings to where only friends of the profile user can see their information, but if unchanged that person's profile and look at that person's information freely. The video also mentions that Facebook users are now in control of who can see what, but have to go through a lot of different things to make sure that they get the settings the way that they want them to be which can seemingkly become a hassle to most people.

So all in all, are the things that we post online really safe and will our information be used in ways in which we never intended it to be?  I believe that there will always be ways for people to take the information that we post online without us knowing it. As for the second question, I believe that as long as advertisers will try and sell us things online that go with our interests and hobbies that we post online, companies will be giving those advertisers our information as long as they get the money from those advertisers. I personally am really big ito music and things of that nature, but do I really want to see ads on Facebook talking about the latest System of a Down cd or Yellowcard cd, not really honestly. So be sure to actually read those private policy stsatements that MySpace, Facebook, and other websites want you to read before you go posting up information about yourself that could wind up in the wrong hands. Yes, this means that you may have to take fifteen or so minutes of your times to read all of that, but think about it, it will be better in the long run to read it and understand it before clicking, yes I have read it and agree to it when you have no idea as to what you just agreed to. By actually reading it, you are more aware of what you are signing up for, so just keep that in mind before signing something completely blindfolded.