Six Ways Your Online Privacy Is at Risk
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Release time：2011-02-07
Browse：3145
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Before the advent of search engines, most of us enjoyed a degree of 'practical obscurity,' but today personal information has become available instantly to anyone with a browser and an Internet connection. There has been a lot of online handwringing about losing our privacy online, but specifically, what are the dangers of having personal information visible to all?
The top online privacy issues include the following:
•Unwanted Disclosure--people getting access to information you didn't want them to see --the impact of this can be devastating. For example, people have lost their jobs because of information disclosed on Facebook that was not intended for all to see. A neighbor of mine told me his son was sent to the principal's office for derogatory information he posted on Facebook about the school; information he was subsequently unable to alter.
• Surveillance--the 'awareness that one is being watched" often leads to "anxiety and discomfort ... self-censorship and inhibition ... [even] social control. It is [almost too] easy to stalk people online, without their knowledge.
• Instability--data policies of online sites change periodically. What is guaranteed today, may not be true tomorrow. There is also a problem of secondary use of data, i.e. the use of data for purposes unrelated to the purposes for which the data was originally collected without the data subject's consent. An example of this includes a change in Facebook's policy of how profile-update information flows from users to their contacts.
• Disagreement about how information is shared online. For example, Facebook allows people to tag other people in photos. Who owns the name tag in a photo has not always been 100% clear. When there are multiple people in the picture, data ownership becomes even more complex.
• Spillovers--Leakage of information occurs in many ways. For example, Facebook's "friend of a friend" feature potentially exposes personal data to third parties. One pernicious use of this type of data is by unscrupulous marketers who mine their friends' networks for business prospects.
• Denigration--the negative representation of reputation online, which can be related to distortion-- being inaccurately characterized--and appropriation-- the use of one's identity or personality for the purposes and goals of another. Examples include incorrect tagging of photos, creating a phony profile of someone (with denigrating information), or posting negative information (like pornography, racial slurs, etc.) on someone's profile page.
Now that we understand the issues of posting personal information online, here are some questions worth thinking about:
• Who owns our online personas? If we post information on a social networking site or write a blog post, who owns the data?
• If I don't want information available about myself online, whether posted by myself or by others, what rights do I have to alter it or remove it? How do I go about changing it?
• What rights do others have to use information about me, and what steps do I need to take to manage my online identity?
These are all complicated issues that are still being fleshed out, in society and in the courtroom.Source from Fast CompanyGet your own web hosting here!
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