The 21st century is known for being called a digital era. The rapid development of science and technology has led to significant changes in people’s lives. Today, it is hard to imagine living a day without using electronic devices and connecting to the Internet. Lots of everyday operations that were time-consuming and tiring before became possible to do on the Internet. There is no doubt that the use of the Internet made people’s lives much more comfortable, but still, the use of the Internet is quite a debatable issue in the modern world. People are using a lot of social app right now and they could publish anything on their account, such as pictures, videos or words. Anything that shared in public is not private because privacy is the concept of concealment from anyone or anything and it controlled by their own. In particular, such a thing as privacy became much harder to maintain, considering that people put a lot of personal data on the Internet. Today, the use of the Internet is no longer an option, but a necessity that forces people to upload their personal data to the Internet where everyone could find it, leaving them without an opportunity to maintain their privacy. Therefore, People need to find a smart way to use internet in order to save their privacy.
When people publish anything, it is no longer private. One very common kind of information we post is personal information about our daily lives. There are two types of personal data that people upload to the Internet. The first one is the things that people post about their everyday life on social media. Recently, the rapid development of social media has led to the fact that almost everyone has a profile on at least one social media. Sharing about the details of one’s life became oversharing as people tend to post online everything that happens to them. The overuse of social media has a lot of negative consequences, including mental health and addiction problems. There is also a negative outcome of social media overuse that one may not realize at the beginning. However, while sharing with the world, people share not only with their friends and family but also with the rest of the world. Everyone can access their profiles and check all the information they have put there. In particular, it became a common practice for employers to check the social media of the candidates for the positions. According to the statistics, 70 percent of employers check the candidate’s profiles due to the wide variety of reasons, including a need to find the information that supports one’s qualification for the job or the reasons not to hire this particular person (Salm). On the one side, it is a good way to learn more about the candidate and see what other people think and post about them as on the interview; everyone would try to act and behave in a professional way. On another side, the person may be refused the job due to the style of life they lead in their free time that has nothing to do with their professional skills.
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One may say that people choose what they are posting online, and no one is forcing them to do so. Even though it is undoubtedly true, the need to talk about the second type of data appears. Nowadays, every person leaves behind a virtual trail every single time someone goes online. Today’s smartphones have data tracking software, cookies, and web bugs that are activated every time one search for something or change location. For example, if someone goes to the store, the place knows only what one has bought and maybe their name if they paid with a credit card. Meanwhile, if a person chooses to purchase something in the Internet shop, the shop knows what types of products one was considering, searching for, and thinking about buying or not. All of that data is carefully analyzed today in order to create successful marketing strategies and campaigns. One major issue with this is “aggregation, which emerges from the fusion of small bits of seemingly innocuous data. When combined, the information becomes much more telling”, (Solove in Lunsford et al., Ch. 28). Further, people may be stopped from accessing knowledge about how data regarding them is being used, and even accessing or correcting this data. According to Solove, secondary use of data entails the exploitation of information sans the subject’s consent (in Lunsford et al., Ch. 28). The length of time for which data is stored is unknown. Equally contentious is the issue of how the data is used in the present and the future (Solove in Lunsford et al., Ch. 28). The use of information has vast implications for accountability.
The main problem with the erosion of privacy in the modern world is that one’s personal data becomes a valuable resource that can be sold or traded. People are affected by those who obtain their personal data in their daily life, and they could even not notice it. For example, political parties can but the personal data of the organization’s clients and target them as potential voters. Today, people have no way of knowing whether their personal data is a subject of interest to others, and they cannot control it in any way. Though efforts are being made through laws like Right to be Forgotten, safeguarding privacy on the internet is still hard (Intelligence Squared. Debate). Once one needs to do something on the web, they have to be prepared for giving out their personal data.
However, someone will argue that individuals can refuse to purchase goods or services online, to safeguard their privacy. Further,some argues that “the next time you hear someone bang-on about how the Internet is destroying individual privacy …remember all the privacy it creates” in terms of competitive data innovation. But the question mark lies in considering the impact of privacy erosion and misuse of data in present times. Further, it may not be realistic to actually limit online purchases, in a day and age where everything from mobile bills and plan renewals, to hotel bookings, and plane tickets can only be paid for online with ease. The inconvenience of giving up on the internet far outweighs the benefits of such an action. To suggest that one may limit internet use to prevent invasion of privacy is an unrealistic suggestion, given the tech-savvy world and advanced societies of present times.
To sum up, privacy became a rare luxury in the modern world. The Internet expanded to such an extent when it is not possible not to use it. Whenever one needs to do something on the Internet, they give out pieces of information about them that result in creating their online profiles by the others. There is no way to avoid this, which means that privacy is no longer entitled to people but rather something they should fight for. The private use of internet is also facilitated by technologies such as Virtual Private Networks, internet cloaking, and programs to encrypt critical information, computer security measures, or passwords to prevent others from hacking or accessing private data (BBC Online). While we can use the internet privately, it should not be this way, because the entire benefit of technologies such as the internet was the anonymity and immediacy of results it provided. The internet is eroding privacy, but technology can move faster still. The question confronting consumers today is whether they can keep up with the rapid advancement.
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