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Privacy

     With all of the wealth of knowledge and communication opportunities that new media provides, there is also the endless risk of a lack of privacy and information mining. New media thrives on the production of “everyday” people, and users can be producers even without knowing it. 

    If you use Facebook or Youtube but never make a post or upload a video, you’re still producing something valuable: data. What you like, what posts you interact with, which videos grab your attention, all of this usage is how you produce valuable information for the developers of new media and the advertising executives who are purchasers of this data. You can make as many attempts to live a private life by not willingly posting about yourself but still have information about yourself not be as confidential as you expected. It has been seen time and time again of the numerous data breaches ranging from social media logins to valuable bank information. 


    Further, if you chose to share some parts of your life with your friends or your followers; you have to live with the knowledge that it can be spread past your intentions. As shown in Attack Ad Marks New Era For Millennials Running For Office by Jessica Taylor, anything you have created or participated in your online private life can very well be used against you in your professional life. Something as silly as a video created with college friends years ago can be manipulated into an attack on your current professional capabilities. There is no right to privacy once you hit that “post” button and it’s something to always bear in mind when participating in new media. 




Comments

  1. AizaDecember 6, 2020 at 4:53 PM

    Hi Nicole,

    I agree with you that everything we have done on the internet can be easily retrieved and used against ourselves, which can be very disturbing. Some people pay a very high price for just once posting a picture, which is not acceptable by the majority, but at the same time, we like to talk about individualism.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Matthew SanchezDecember 8, 2020 at 12:25 PM

    Hello Nicole,

    This is a great post, many people forget that nothing is private on the internet, even as you said "as silly as a video created with college friends years ago" will not be private and can be used against you. You also brought up a great point about data, even if we don't upload anything, we're still producing data. Our data not even private either as it be sold off to third-party platform by Google and Facebook which both came under fire because of these practices.

    ReplyDelete

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